The Albino Album

The A l b in o A l b um

Th e A l bi n o A l bu m (a novel)

Ch avi sa Woods

Seven Stories Press New York

© 2013 by Chavisa Woods A Seven Stories Press First Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Book design by Jon Gilbert Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Woods, Chavisa.

The albino album : a novel / by Chavisa Woods. pages cm ISBN 978-1-60980-476-3 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3623.O6753A79 2013 813’.6--dc23 2012046136 Printed in the United States 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Sahar

Playlist Side One Track One: Eye of the Tiger 9 Track Two: The Blue Mask 36 Track Three: News of the World 75 Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues 106 Track Five: Private Dancer 131 Track Six: Name 164 Track Seven: School Night 190 Track Eight: Telephone 213 Track Nine: Crime Wave 219

6

Side Two Track One: Send Me an Angel 243 Track Two: The Chain 272 Track Three: The Cat Came Back 315 Track Four: This is a Man’s World 346 Track Five: A Little Less Conversation 376 Track Six: Moon Over Bourbon Street 406 Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues 433 Track Eight: Building a Mystery 478 Track Nine: Cat People (Putting Out Fire) 533 Track Ten: Burn 542

7

Side one I’ve made love to my mother, killed my father and my brother What am I to do?

—“The Blue Mask” by Lou Reed

track one

Eye of the Tiger

she was a large woman , not like birds. China Lynn, like fine;

fine China, fine powder, and like leaving baby girls out on windowsills to die, she’d heard. She’d heard they did that there. She pictured the Chinese baby girls cooing on windowsills with the potted plants while the sun was shining on them till night when the cold took their breath.

She was a large woman, not like her birds, and she never would have left a baby girl out on the windowsill to die. Even if she only got one. Oh, if she were only allowed one baby, she would have been pleased if it was a girl.

“Eye of the Tiger.” That was the song that was playing and also that was what was reflecting in the mirror as she painted her blue shadow up to her brows: an eye of a tiger printed on the rug that hung on the wall behind her. That big, sparkling velvety tiger perpetually purred at her and her little birds; seven Cockatiels, three Parakeets, and five Lovebirds. One of the Lovebirds had died, leaving an odd number. Even birds mourn. The widow didn’t sing anymore, and China imagined it would go along too, soon enough, but she told it to be strong. “Down a gin and tonic and take a look around you, lady,” she told the bird when it first stopped singing.

“Death’s gonna come fast enough as it is without you calling him on with your silence.” China figured Death must be drawn to silence.

Death is so silent, he must be drawn to silent people, silent places, silent things like widowed Lovebirds that have given up their song.

9

“Death ain’t coming in here, hump ump um,” China said, and tapped on the widow’s cage. “Sing sumpin, pretty girl.” Then she took it upon herself to start the singing as she rubbed some gloss on her lips.

There was a tap on the door before it opened, but they didn’t really even need to knock. They coulda just walked in.

“Hey, baby sis. Oh, this motherfucker been after me for something. I need to settle here for a few hours.”

She wasn’t even through the door and she’d started hollering, a cigarette cascading smoke from one hand, her daughter holding tightly to her other. China replaced her makeup to the drawer and turned. Her sister smoked. “Well, you look all nice,” her sister told her.

And China did look nice. Today she had on a white and silver dress shirt that hung loosely from her buoyant frame, ornamented here and there with silver necklaces and pins. She was wearing thirteen rings. On some fingers she wore two or three piled on top of each other. There were two silver spoons, smashed and bent, an opal, some thin white gold bands tied together that made clinking noises, a wedding ring with diamonds, and a tough-looking silver cat head. Her blond hair was crimped and hung down past her shoulders, pulled back with a gold headband that highlighted her high blue eye shadow.

But she never felt she looked as nice as her sister, even though her sister seldom put any effort into her upkeep. Her sister was thin, and that’s all that she needed to be. She wore no makeup, let her long dishwater hair go naturally, hanging down around her face. She wore tight, tight jeans, a man’s work shirt, and somehow she was stunning. Endlessly. Simply. But the most stunning thing about her, to China, had nothing to do with her present body. The most stunning thing about her was a thing that had been extracted from her body and now held tightly to her hand.

Together, her sister and her sister’s little daughter looked more sensuous than China believed should be legal. The little girl was 10

Side One

a thin thing as well, but serious, with long, straight red hair. They looked like they were naturally and permanently attached at the palm, the way they were now holding hands like they might still be one body, the eight-year-old girl walking in time with her mother, letting go a moment to hug China and then finding her mother’s hand and holding again without effort or communication. And something of the summer heat, the little sweat that collected on her daughter’s bare shoulders and her sister’s gold tan, gave them a lusty, juicy look, like maybe they were some tropical fruit plant, something tall and thin, all dewy and wet in the early morning light, waiting to be plucked.

“Panama, you in some kind of trouble?” China asked.

“No, nothing. Crazy ole boy wants me to pay up the seventy I owe him I aint got. It’s the last for Lotus.”

“She is a beautiful puppy. How much did he charge you all together?”

“Eighty-five.”

“That’s good for a pit.”

“I know, sis. An allllbiiiino.” The word came out long and dramatic like she was lusting over the thought. She was lusting over the thought. She had a new albino pit bull puppy named Lotus.

She leaned over to put her cigarette out in the ashtray. “But I only paid him fifteen. I told him I’d have it in a few days, but I aint got the rest of the money,” she said, laughing and groaning about it while she reached her cigarette around her daughter for the tray.

The hot cherry of the cigarette got her little daughter on her bare shoulder. The girl jumped and covered the burned place with the hand that wasn’t holding onto her mother. The other hand kept holding on. The girl pursed her face but didn’t cry. Such a serious, beautiful little girl, China thought.

Panama let out a shriek, “Hunny, you okay? I’m sorry. You got some ice, sissy? Ow, hunn, I’m sorry.” She put the cigarette in the tray and told it, “Bad cigarette.”

China went into the kitchen for some ice. “This guy’s on me for Track One: Eye of the Tiger

11

it. I told him not to get his britches in wad,” Panama hollered. “I’m good for it. I’m not going nowhere.” She made her way around to look at all the birdcages with her daughter. “God knows, I’m not goin no fuckin where,” she muttered to herself. “Although I gotta say though, it would be nice. It would be fuckin nice if I were goin somewhere. Gotta get the hell outta here someday, aint that right, hunny? Someplace tropical. Whatda you think?” The girl tilted her head to her mother. Her mother kept on. “Someday you and me gonna go, gonna get. Or how bout New York City? You like that one? Aint nothing beautiful and big and bright as that Empire State Building. I seen pictures folks took from on top of it. On top of that building, you can see everything. It’s so tall you can see the whole world, see all of civilization. You can see the ocean looking like it’s spilling off. You can see how the world is round from up there. If I was standing under that thing, I’d know I could do anything. I’d be free. Be that big. That bright. Big old sparkling building like a lighthouse showing us the way outta this storm. Up on top of that Empire State Building, we’d be free, baby. Free as a bird.” Panama was always going on like this. “New York City’s where dreams live. What do you say, baby? You gonna go be free with me in New York City someday?”

The girl whistled. “What’s this one called?” she asked, scooting herself up to a white bird with a green Mohawk-like tuft on its head.

“That one’s a teal cock. No, cockatiel! Oh my god,” she gasped.

“China, I just told my daughter this was a teal cock.”

“You better tell her to stay away from anything with a teal cock!

Come here, hunn, let me see the shoulder.” China took a knee on the girl’s level and melted the ice where the cigarette had burned her. “Panama, you have to be careful with those things.”

The ice melting on the girl’s shoulder stirred feelings in China’s stomach. They were motherly feelings, she guessed, but something about them, if she had to describe them honestly in words, would have probably disturbed some people. Her motherly feelings were 12

Side One

sensuous. There was sensuality in the ice melting on the helpless bare skin and the serious quiet eyes that seemed always suspicious and yet always aching for and accepting of love. These were the eyes of little girls, and these eyes drove her mad with wanting, wanting them to look at her with the most intense aching, begging love from a mother.

“Okay, then. You just hold the rest of it there. You want some juice or something, baby?” The girl shook her head left-right, in the no direction.

“You got anything to drink?” Panama asked.

“I got some whiskey. Got something else you don’t drink, too.”

“Oh really? Hunny, you stay out here. Your aunt’s got to show me something in the bedroom,” Panama told her daughter.

China flipped the volume up on the cassette player and they exited, leaving the girl alone with the birds. from the cassette player , the guitar started its anticipatory

trills before the heavy bass and drums came in dunt dunt dunting.

Then the sound of a tambourine set a syncopated beat between all the rest, making way for David Bickler to proclaim, in a rusty near-falsetto, “Rising up, back on the street, did my time, took my chances . . .”

The girl let her body rock to the beat and mouthed along with the words before losing herself in the fantasy of the birds. The little white cages looked like castles and gazebos, and the birds became sleek royalty, runaway princes and princesses, and she, a magical fairy god. She squeezed the cool liquid left by the ice through her fingers and rubbed it on her face. The birds chirped, and she whispered words into their chirping. She moved, as if in a trance, from cage to cage, followed by the sound of bell-like bird whistles, whispering words over the whistles that told the stories of her mythologies of birds.

“I love you. I’m running away tonight. Meet me in the gazebo when the moon is full.” Chirp chirp, whistle whistle. “But how will Track One: Eye of the Tiger

13

you get through the bars, Goliath? Oh, that’s easy, my beak is very strong. And I have the help of a fairy god, anyway.” china leaned over the mirror, holding her heavy, dangling necklaces against her chest so they wouldn’t knock anything of value. “I don’t got much left, so we just get two each. I’m gonna want some later when I get back.” She snorted her line up through a cold metal tube and handed it to her sister.

Panama snorted half a line and tilted her head back. “That ole boy’s a trip. I think he’s hot for me on top of me owing him. He’s like glue. Won’t leave me alone.”

“You can hang out here for a minute. I got to go, though, in a few. I have a court date.”

“What’d they get you for?”

“They didn’t get me for nothing. I got them. I’m suing the mayor.”

“You still doing that? Over that fall you took in December?”

“It was on his property.”

“You was the one walking on it. Isn’t that trespassing?” Panama bent down and sucked up the second half of the line.

“It was on the sidewalk, and you know him and all his boys were givin out tickets all winter for not clearing the ice. They gave Tanya a seventy-five dollar ticket for not clearing the ice off her walk out front of her beauty shop. And there he goes, his walk as slick as a wet willy. That’s god-damned hypocritical. I fell right down on it.

Turned my ankle. You seen. I’ve got the doctor’s reports and all right here. I don’t think it’s ever healed right. Look.” She pulled the bottom of her pant leg up to show her ankle, but Panama didn’t see anything wrong.

“I hope you do win,” she said. “Maybe if you get that money outta him, I can borrow some from you to pay off for Lotus? I’d rather owe you than Mister Looney Tunes.” She bent down and inhaled her second line. China picked the mirror up from the waterbed and leaned it against the wall. “China, he’s a real weird fella.

14

Side One

Deals exclusively in albino animals. If an animal comes in albino, he can get it. Don’t know where he gets them from or who for.”

“He got one for you, didn’t he? I guess that’s who for. I don’t know how he’s making any money though, selling them cheap like that.”

“Aw, he doesn’t always do that. I told you, he’s sweet on me. He’s stuck like glue.”

“I gotta get going.” China collected her purse and a folder full of papers from her drawer and opened the bedroom door.

As she stepped into the living room, something yellow and feathery flapped past China’s face. Panama’s daughter was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, whispering to a bird on her finger. Two others perched on her bare shoulders as the rest flew about the room, occasionally stopping to land on a knickknack or chair before returning to the air.

“What in God’s name?” Panama said, walking out to her daughter. “Did you let them out of their cages? Why the hell did you do that?”

The girl turned her attention to her mother, but said nothing.

“It’s all right, sissy,” China told her. “I let them out sometimes.”

“You do? Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s got into her. I guess she’s just like her momma, don’t like to see nothing caged up.”

The girl walked over to her mother, keeping a bird on her finger, and took hold of her mother’s hand with her other. Panama wiped the girl’s forehead, then kissed her on her cheek, like the girl had been through something.

“I let them out sometimes, but not all at once though.” China turned the cassette tape off and began gathering her birds back to the cages. “This one didn’t go out?” she asked, stopping in front of the cage of the widowed Lovebird. The small cage door was open, but there the bird sat on its perch, silent as ever, uninterested in flight.

“She’s sad,” the girl said seriously. “She’s sad and she’s not having any visitors.”

China raised a slightly blue brow at the girl. “That gives me a real uneasy feeling when you talk like that.”

Track One: Eye of the Tiger

15

“Can I have some of your whiskey?” Panama asked, wiping her nose and lighting a cigarette. “You want one before you go?”

“No. I gotta get out of here now. I gotta have a clear head for this court thing. You can have whatever you want though.”

“Okay, then I’ll help myself,” Panama said, taking a long drag and resting the hand that was holding the cigarette across her front, so that the cigarette fell again, the hot cherry on her little daughter’s bare shoulder. The girl started and the last bird flew away from her finger, back into its cage. “Oh fuck, I did it again.”

Panama was laughing, with an embarrassed and sorry expression on her face, but she was laughing. She bent down to her daughter, “Baby, I’m sorry! You okay?” She took her daughter by the shoulders to comfort her, but she still hadn’t put her cigarette away, and she did it again, right then, one more time, same shoulder, same cigarette. The girl stepped back quickly away from her and rubbed her burned skin. China came over, snatched the cigarette out of Panama’s hand and extinguished it in the ashtray.

“I don’t guess you should have any more of these today. I’ve heard of people that can’t handle their drinking, but this about beats it. You all right?” The girl nodded yes from heaven to hell; up, down. Her eyes were reddening and wet. “I gotta go,” China said. “Try not to set fire to this place. I’ll just be gone an hour or so,” she told them. “Lock the door behind me.” And she took off.

The girl locked the door behind her.

Panama made her way into the kitchen to pour herself a drink.

Her daughter followed behind her. She handed the girl a piece of ice. “Here, put that on it. It’ll feel better soon, baby. I didn’t get you bad, did you?”

“Did I what?”

“What are you talking about? You okay?”

“I’m okay.” She let out a long sigh and rolled her eyes, letting the ice melt between her hand and shoulder. Panama sipped the whiskey and soda.

“Mom, are we going to uncle Nam’s now? I wanna see uncle Nam.” 16

Side One

“No, hunny. He got called off on a truck route this morning.

He’s gone for four days. We’re gonna stay here today, all right?”

“Then can we go see uncle Thai?”

Panama was one of seven children. She had five brothers and one sister. They all bore the names of various countries. Oldest to youngest, there was Thailand, Panama, Vietnam, China, Brazil, Egypt, and Chad.

Naming in the family was a funny thing. Panama’s mother and her nine siblings had all been named after flowers. Panama’s brother, Thai, had named his three girls after the seasons, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. China was intending to name her kids names beginning with the letter X. Panama had started with her first and thus far only child adorning her in the strangest of all dresses yet fashioned by her family.

She had named the girl a name that wasn’t a name, a name that wasn’t even a word. She had named the girl an onomatopoeia-type thing that even when pronounced correctly was incomprehensible as a name to most and nearly impossible for anyone, upon the first meeting, to pronounce at all. Most people didn’t even try to say it. When introduced to the girl, they just nodded and said, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” Smiling down at her too big, the type of smile that made her stomach hurt.

“What do you want to see Nam for?”

“Maybe he would take me on a ride today like last time. He said he would again when it’s not raining.”

Nam didn’t have any children and Panama hoped he never would. He was too crazy and tough for kids, and had spent too much time in jail for more than unscrupulous activity for her to feel at all comfortable at the prospect. He was a father to his Harley, she figured. That was enough.

“Maybe next weekend, then, he can take you for a ride. It’s supposed to be sunny. We’re staying here now, though. Let’s go into the living room and find something to do.”

Track One: Eye of the Tiger

17

panama sat her drink on the side table and laid herself down on the zebra-striped couch. Her daughter sat on her stomach and played with her mother’s hair. “Baby, hand me my drink, can you?” The girl handed her mother the whiskey from the table. She sipped at it.

“What are we going to do today?” the girl asked, shaking her mother’s hair like horse reins.

“You want me to tell you stories?”

“Tell me stories. Tell me the one about the naked woman. The one you painted a picture of.”

“You love the story about the naked woman. The one with the long hair?”

“And the horse.”

“Are you riding a horsey?” The girl bounced on her and laughed. “Her name was Lady Godiva.”

“Like the chocolate!”

“Yes, like the chocolate. And she had hair so long it could wrap around her body three times, and a horse sooooo big it had to kneel to let her on it and it wouldn’t let anybody else on it but her.”

“And she rode through the towns naked on the horse with her hair wrapped around her?”

“Yes, babygirl, she did. You know the story!”

“But why did she do that, mom?”

“I don’t know, hunny. Why do you think?”

The girl let herself go into a giddy, childish stream of consciousness: “I think she did it to stop all the wars. I think she did it cause when a town was at war, she’d ride through naked on that big horse, then she would unwrap her hair that way when she got right into the middle of the town and let it trail behind her for miles in the wind while she rode fast around the town, and all the people saw her and how beautiful she was and that made them remember life was beautiful and not to kill anybody anymore.”

“That’s beautiful, baby.” They gave each other big smiles. But her mother’s smile was resentful. “You think she was doing it for

18

Side One

world peace.” Her mother’s eyes laughed at her. “That’s real sweet, babygirl.” The laughing look in her mother’s eyes gave the girl the feeling that her mother thought she was being dim.

“Now you tell me why.”

Panama took a near final big gulp of her whiskey and her eyes went serious and gray. She rubbed her daughter’s cheek with her thumb. “I know why she did it, babygirl.”

“Why?” the girl whispered, serious and anticipating.

“She did that, because . . . you remember, she had a sword?”

“Oh yeah.”

Panama scooted herself up on her elbows and let her voice go low and tough. “Well, she had her beauty, but she had a sword too.

Her beauty was for her and not for no one else to touch. That’s why she had to have the sword, to keep it that way. She liked the feeling of being so powerful and free, she could ride around with her naked body and long hair wild and free and nobody, not even no man who wanted to, could touch her. She did it to show them that she could do whatever she wanted, let it all hang out, and she was still in control and no one could fuck with her, even when she was naked. That’s why she did it.”

“Oh.” Panama sucked the last of the whiskey from a piece of ice and handed the glass to her daughter to replace to the table. “You know where evil people come from, baby?”

“Same as everybody,” the girl shrugged.

“No. That’s not right.” Panama took the girl’s head in her hands and held it so that her daughter had to look her in her now serious eyes. “A long, long time ago, the demons from the devil came up to the earth and took on male human form and mated—you know what mated means? Yeah? Okay—they tricked women into mating with them, and the ones who wouldn’t they forced, and now some people is born with the demons in them. I saw one. He levitated me when I was little like you. He had pointy ears, and his name was . . .”

Track One: Eye of the Tiger

19

The girl pulled her head away from her mother’s grip, interrupting her. “Mom, I’m thirsty. Can I have some juice now?”

“You don’t want to hear any more stories?”

“Later, after the juice.”

Panama scooted the girl off of her stomach and went into the kitchen. She poured her daughter some orange juice and poured herself another drink too. Her head was feeling like a ship swishing, the way she liked it.

Her daughter stayed in the living room and messed with the cassette. The birds were chirping. “This one’s only got one song on it,” the girl yelled to her mother, turning the cassette over in her hands. “It’s the same song on both sides.”

“That’s called a single, hunny,” her mom hollered.

“I wanted to have a dance party, though.”

“We can have a dance party with one song, baby. It’ll just keep going. Put it on.”

Panama sat the drinks on the table. The girl put the tape into the player, closed the box, and pushed the play button down. Her mom flipped the volume up high. the melody exists somewhere unknown inside the rhythm.

The rhythm begins hard like a scruffy hot lover and you can sense the melody that exists within it. But it doesn’t come out just yet.

Not yet. The rhythm is still blasting hot, still dropping and picking itself up. The melody is brought finally by a quick touch of piano keys, that melody, rusty and pink as it is, intoned in a drunken falsetto, blushing at the cheeks and five o’clock shadowed. And suddenly you are rising up. You are back on the street. You have done your time from taking your chances. What did that time look like? It doesn’t sound as if it has stifled anything in you. It sounds as if it has actually grown your passion rather than suppressed it, that time you spent in the cage. You are back on your feet. You are just a man and his will . . . to survive.

20

Side One

the girl rocked her head and shook her small hips. Panama bounced up and down and took her daughter by the hands, spinning her round. Their thin frames went for it, both stomping and shaking as they howled along. The drums beat heavy again and a guitar squealed out something visceral. Panama took her thin hands and placed them on her daughter’s chest, shoving the girl backward. The girl jumped and howled and pushed back hard against her mother’s stomach. They crashed again and again, always bouncing back, singing on: “Face to face, out in the heat!

Hangin tough, stayin hungry!” They raised their fists in the air, shaking their hair hard, then fell to the floor, exhausted. The song kept on as they lay there panting.

“Aunt China’s house dance party number three!” the girl squealed.

Her mom rolled on the floor and patted her on the head. “I’m tired now, baby.” She rose to her feet and turned the volume down, then made her way over to the couch, collected the half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray and lit it. “You have fun? That was fun!” she said, the cigarette dangling from her lips as she shook the match out.

“Yeah, I like having dance parties with you.” The girl pushed her now tangled hair out of her face.

Panama took a long drag of her cigarette and sat down on the couch. “Come here, babygirl. Come sit by momma and drink your juice.” The song was still playing on repeat, but low.

“I’m gonna just stay here right now,” the girl told her, pulling at the threads of the white carpet.

“What? I won’t tell you any more scary stories, unless you want to hear another story. But you don’t, do you?” her mother asked her, almost accusingly.

The girl shrugged.

“Come over here now. I miss you all the way over there.”

She didn’t move.

“Come over here and drink your juice. It’s gonna be time for you to eat something soon.”

Track One: Eye of the Tiger

21

The girl got up and went to the couch. She sat a ways away, but Panama pulled her over and cuddled her into her side. Panama took a big sip of whiskey and the girl took her cup of juice from the table and sipped at it, humming along to the end of the song, then humming along to the beginning of the song. The birds chirped again and she just let her mind rest on them while her mom was petting and kissing her head, drunkenly fumbling, letting the hot end of her cigarette rest on her daughter’s bare shoulder. Same shoulder.

Same cigarette. Same burning feeling, almost. But she felt it differently this time. It was something she was beginning to accept. They were all alone now and there was no reason to jump or fuss. The birds should be named Bible names, she thought. They should be named Ezekiel. They should be named Goliath. In Ezekiel there were birds. They said the land turned to flesh from a curse and the birds came and pecked the flesh of the earth till the rivers were rivers of blood. That was a good name. Her mom lifted the cigarette for a moment taking a drag, then pretended to be overwhelmingly sleepy, keeping her girl up against her side, she rested her head on her daughter’s head and put the newly hot part of the cigarette back on her shoulder. Goliath was a good name too. Goliath was a big giant who got killed with a sling. Big, big giant. Little David.

Little stone. And David, she thought, didn’t he also kill a lion?

“Baby, what’s wrong? Oh my God!” Panama wiped the tears away from her daughter’s face. The girl was making no outward expression of crying, but there were tears running all over her face.

“Babygirl, I was burning you again! Oh my God, what the fucking hell is wrong with me? I must be out of it! I’m so sorry, come here.”

She wrapped her arms around her daughter to comfort her, but again, she still had the cigarette, and again she burned her with it.

Same shoulder. Same cigarette. The girl flinched slightly. Panama jumped, stood, and extinguished the cigarette dramatically in the tray as if it had a life of its own.

“Goddamnit to hell! I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me.” The girl just stared at her, but she wasn’t hearing anything.

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She was listening to Survivor talking about guts and glory and the little sound of the chirping birds. Panama grabbed another cigarette out of the pack and held it to her daughter. “You must hate me. Do you hate me?”

The girl made an effort to shake her head no, but didn’t get very far.

“Here. You want to burn me with one? I’ll let you. Baby, I’m sorry. You can burn me with one.” Panama got down on the floor and put her head on her daughter’s knees. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I guess you just look like an ashtray today.”

She smiled up at her daughter, tears in both their eyes. her daughter wiped her own tears away. “How could I look

like an ashtray?”

Panama got up quickly, went to the kitchen and came back with some ice. “Here. Put this on again . . . Oh my God! Again! What the fuck is wrong with me?” The girl took the ice and put it on her shoulder. The cigarette her mother had offered her was sitting on the table. Panama picked it up. The girl kept her clear, cold serious eyes on her as she lit it. “You must fucking hate me. You wanna do it?” She held the lit cigarette out to her daughter. The girl stared into the red-eyed cherry glowing on the end and made no response. “Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll fuckin do it. This is for you, hunny.

I’m sorry.” Panama held her arm out dramatically. “I want you to watch this so you know I mean it. So you see I’m really sorry.”

The girl did watch, without expression, as her mother pressed the hot-eyed cherry into her own forearm, just below the wrist.

Panama’s flesh made a hissing sound as the cigarette extinguished.

Panama squared her jaw and nodded as if she had just accomplished a task she had been meaning to do for a long time. The girl thought she could smell the burned flesh.

There was a knock at the door.

Panama put her finger to her lips, motioning for her daughter to keep quiet. She tossed the cigarette near the ashtray and Track One: Eye of the Tiger

23

began darting around the room in little hops, like she was chasing a bunny that kept disappearing. The knock came again, harder this time, followed by the gruff bass of a man’s voice.

“Panama! I know you’re in there. Open the goddamned door.

Come on. You can’t do this forever.”

“It’s him,” she whispered at her daughter. “It’s Mister Looney Tunes.”

Her daughter’s face brightened at the thought. Or maybe brightened is not the right word. Her expression had been one of someone viewing a pile of shit burning at the bottom level of hell; it rose just a bit above that.

Three big booms came once more. “Open the goddamned door or I’m gonna kick it in. I swear to God, woman. I aint expecting you to pay up this minute. But we gotta at least talk, figure something out.”

Panama pointed at the girl, cupping a hand over the burnt place on her own arm. “I’m going to go into the bathroom. You tell him I’m not here. That you don’t know where I am. You understand?” she whispered hard.

Her daughter nodded yes. A small nod, not from God to the Devil, but from the trees to the grass. Panama skipped into the bathroom and closed the door shut.

“Now listen, woman, I can hear you shuffling around in there, and Ed said he saw you come in and he aint seen you come out.”

He pounded again, four times. “Now I’m gonna count to ten, and then I’m not waiting anymore for you to open this door. But that don’t mean I’m leaving. One. Two.” The girl rubbed the cold water from the melted ice through her hair. She stood and walked over to the cassette player and turned it off. The silence surrounded her, dotted here and there with the chirping of birds. She whistled back at them.

“Seven!”

She made her way calmly to the door, undid the two deadbolts and let it open. Mister Looney Tunes was standing there. He had 24

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on a black leather jacket. She knew the jacket. It had an American flag sewn on the back with some silver studs. He wore blue jeans that just barely fit with black cowboy boots and a pencil mustache under his nose. He was balding on top, but had grown his hair down nearly to his shoulders and combed it all back. His hair was black and slicked from grease, and now slicked too from the sweat that also dotted his stubbled, red face, which softened when he saw that little girl standing there looking up at him with those serious, calm eyes.

Her eyes, he thought, maybe they weren’t really calm. Maybe they were just blank. Or maybe they were seeing something that wasn’t there at all, or seeing right through him. That gave him the feeling that, if they were seeing him, and seeing right through him, maybe he was the thing they were seeing that wasn’t there. Maybe he wasn’t there. That’s not what the eyes of all little girls did to him, but that’s what the eyes of this little girl did to him: made him feel self-conscious about the very basic fact of his own existence. She was strange, but she sure was a pretty little girl. His face softened when he saw her standing there.

“Can I help you?” she asked, too politely for all the hammering he’d been doing.

“Is yer momma at home?”

“Nope. She went out to get some milk.”

“She go out this front door here?”

“No she didn’t. She went out the back door.”

“Well dolly, you mind if I sit myself down in there and wait on her till she gets back?”

“Fine.” She turned from him, leaving the door open, and made her way over to the birds.

He plopped himself down on the couch and took a look around him. The girl was whispering to the birds and fidgeting with the latches on their cages. “You keep doin that, they liable to get out.”

She didn’t turn to look at him. “You got anything to drink in here?”

“There’s a whiskey and coke in that glass there.”

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“That’s not yours, is it?” She didn’t respond. “Well, all right.”

He took a sip at the drink and puckered his face. “That soda’s flat.” He dropped it hard on the table. She didn’t turn to look.

He just stayed there a few more minutes looking restless. Then he fidgeted in his pockets and took out a big key chain. There were about fifteen keys on the chain as well as a Rubik’s Cube, but the colors were different than on regular ones. This one was white with different animal patterns in black. There were zebra stripes, white spots, little tufts of fur prints, and some squares were totally white.

He started fidgeting with it for a few moments before he noticed the girl had come over and was standing next to him, watching him intently. She pulled on the strap of her tank top shirt and shifted her weight. “You like this?” he asked her.

“Yeah, I done those before. But this one’s different from the ones I did.”

“Come here. Sit down, little lady.” He pulled her over onto his knee and handed the cube over to her. “It’s the same thing.

Just instead of colors, it’s got patterns. It’s still got six sides, see.”

They turned the cube. He pointed with a rough, meaty finger to the little squares. “See. This is a mathematical equation sort of thing. It’s got six sides and nine of those little squares on each side.

So how many of those little squares you have to deal with then?

Hmm? What’s nine times six?” She looked at him blankly. Then she turned her head to the ceiling and he figured she was mulling it over. Her mouth opened, but instead of giving an answer, she just started whistling like a bird. Like maybe she’d even forgotten he was asking her a question. “Dolly, you should know that. How old are you? Here, come here, this leg’s bad. Why don’t you scoot over here on my good knee?” He put his hands round her tiny waist and shifted her to his other knee. As he was shifting her, he heard a rumbling from the bathroom. He looked suspiciously toward the rumbling, but the girl kept on turning the Rubik’s Cube. After a couple seconds of rumbling, the door swung open and Panama came out, fierce like a soldier stalking in the woods, the blade of a 26

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small army-grade knife held out in front of her. She was pointing it in the direction of Mister Looney Tunes.

“You get her the fuck off yer lap you goddamnedsonofabitch.”

“Panama! Well, I thought you wuz out getting milk. Why you pointing that knife, woman?”

“It’s a good thing I wasn’t out getting milk. Leave you alone five minutes, and you getting sweet with my baby.”

“Panama, I’m just showing her something.”

“I know what you’re showing her.” She was walking slowly at him, making sticking motions with the knife as she came, her face squared, set and angry.

“No! I wasn’t doing nothing to her. Why don’t you two switch places and I’ll show you how good I am at not doing nothing?”

“You piece of shit.” She hollered her daughter’s name. “Get off his knee.” The girl stood calmly and sat down beside him on the couch, still engrossed in the cube. “You think I’m jealous? You think I’m one of those bitches who gets jealous of their babies? I’ll tell you what kinda bitch I am. No one ever gonna do to her what’s been done to me. That’s my babygirl. And if you try, I’ll cut your balls off with a rusty knife and feed em to ya.”

He held his hands in the air like surrender. “I wasn’t doing nothing. Now, come on. Dolly, tell her I was doing nothing to you.” He nudged the girl’s shoulder. She put her hand over it and grimaced.

“Nothing.” She shook her head at her mother, and looked back down at the cube. “He wasn’t doing nothing,” she whispered.

“What’s more than that,” Panama said, circling him with the knife still out, “if I don’t have a rusty knife, I’ll tie you up, put my knife in water and wait for it to get rusty. Then when yer hungry from being tied up all that time, I’ll cut yer balls off with it and feed em to you. Your Cockatiel too.”

She was inventive with her ideas of what to do to him when it came to ways of killing him. He stood abruptly, smacking his hands on his thighs. “I’ve had about enough of this!” he hollered.

“You’re acting like a paranoid bitch. You start saying I’m like that Track One: Eye of the Tiger

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to people, that I’m sweet for kids, well, I don’t know what. I guess I’ll have to cut yer tits off and feed em to you. How do you like that?

Huh? Crazy woman! I wasn’t doing nothin! I don’t want nothing with no kids! No little girls. Jesus fucking Christ, woman!”

She jabbed the knife in his face. “You better not!” she hollered.

“I don’t!”

Panama shook her head and stuck the knife down in the back of her pants. She turned to her daughter. “You like that puzzle, baby?” The girl didn’t look at them. “She’s crazy about puzzles.”

“Yeah, I got that,” he said, still recovering from the insanity.

“You can keep that if you figure it out, girl.” The girl turned her head up to him, and he thought he detected a smile. It was trembling at the sides of her mouth.

“Oh, what, you gonna make her earn it?” Panama asked, accusingly.

“Jesus. Fine. Whatever, she can have it. I just gotta get my keys off it. Look, you and I need to have an adults’ conversation about the money. Don’t pull yer knife out on me again. I have some real work, nothing funny, real help I need that you can do in two days’ time to pay me back that way if you want.”

The door opened. “What’s that van out there?” China pushed her way through, a beaming look on her face and a folder full of disheveled papers under her arm.

“Hey, sister. That was quick. You get it? You win?”

“I better than won. Oh, he found you, huh?”

“Won what?” Mister Looney Tunes asked.

“She’s been suing the mayor. Can you believe that?” Panama told him.

“I better than won. They met me outside the courtroom and settled right there. Guess they didn’t want no public display. That’s what they said, public display.” She set her papers and things down on the coffee table and went over to check herself in the mirror.

The blue eye shadow swept up like a storm from her lids to her eyebrows. Her lips were full, pink, and executive looking. She took her large size into account and enjoyed the way her white and 28

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silver shirt and necklaces cascaded from her frame. She bounced her large breasts as if they were powerful pectoral muscles and combed her hair. “I’m getting the money, anyway, without even a trial.” But that’s what she had wanted, maybe more than the money—a trial, a public display. She’d got all dressed up and the only ones who had the chance to witness her were the two lawyers and the mayor himself. But she figured maybe importance of people trumps quantity of people. “What’s that big van out there?” she asked Mister Looney Tunes again.

“That’s the business I was coming here to talk to Panama about.”

The girl stood with the Rubik’s cube and key chain dangling from her hand. She tugged on her mom’s shirt. “Can I go outside?

I’m tired of being in here.”

“All right. But stay close.”

She made her way slowly out the door, turning the cube as she went. The sound of the keys jingled against the birds’ constant whistling, and her whistling too, as if to return their whistles, as if to say goodbye.

“She sure is a strange one,” Mister Looney Tunes told Panama.

“What’s that mean, she’s strange?” Panama gave him a fighting look.

“She is a little odd, sissy,” China told her. “But it’s in a good way.

We’re all a little odd.”

“She’s just too smart,” Panama came back.

“She needs to learn her math,” Mister Looney Tunes told her.

“Naw, me and her, we’re smart in special ways,” Panama said.

“You ever heard that line, ‘Where you stop, that’s where I begin?’” Panama was being strange and dramatic now too. Maybe they were strange in the same way. But Mister Looney Tunes didn’t know if he would call them smart. Then again, he didn’t know who exactly he would call smart. But when he thought about it, he imagined someone like a chess player with thick owl glasses.

“I guess that’s probably true, Panama. I guess that’s about right.

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But I come to talk to you about something, and you all aint gonna believe what I got out there.”

China went over to the cassette and pressed play, turning the volume low. “You talking about what you got in that big white van?”

“That’s not a van, hunn. That’s a wagon hitched to a pickup. I got something in it that’s gonna blow your minds. I gotta drive it out west to Nevada. It takes about two days driving. I don’t want to drive it alone. I figured your sister could pay me back in work trade.

Drive some and help me with the maps and the care and all.”

“The care?”

“There’s something in there that needs a lot of care. I got a special order six months ago from this guy. Now I don’t have nothing to base this on, but I got a hunch he works for those fruits, Roy and that German guy. You know who I’m talking bout?”

“Yep.” “Why you think that?”

“Cause this is just the kinda thing those fellers like, and it’s real hard to find. I’m not even at liberty to tell you how I got hold of it.”

“What do you have in there, Mister Crazy?”

He leaned in and whispered. “You heard the term, ‘getting a tiger by the tail’? Now, you know what else they say too? Yeah, but what I got in there isn’t any kind of dark thing. What I got in there is pure whiteness. White like the morning light that will jump up and bite you in the ass. What I got in there is an albino white tiger in a cage.”

“You’re not serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“What the hell’re you thinking!” hollered China. “Driving a tiger around this little town. That’s not legal! And wanting her to ride with you in it! With it in it and you!” China’s face was all scrunched up. “My God, you are a crazy sonofabitch! And bringing it here in my yard. Get it outta here right now! Get it out!”

“Calm down, girl. It’s in a cage, double reinforced steel, and 30

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I got five locks on that thing. Four deadbolts and one heavy-duty combination. It’s not going anywhere. I got a license for handling this kinda thing. You women are hysterical today.”

“Well, then, I guess I just don’t know anything about anything,” China said, fanning herself.

“Calm down. Come on and loosen up. You wanna see it?”

“I wanna see it. I really do, sis,” Panama said.

“I knew you wouldn’t have any problem with it. Tell your sister to calm herself down.”

“Come on, China.”

“I aint going out there to see no white tiger.”

“If you don’t, you might regret it someday.”

“Oh no, I’m not going to be regretting nothing.”

“Why don’t you sniff some white tiger, calm down, and come see it?” Panama told her.

“You girls got some?” asked Mister Looney Tunes.

“Sure we got some.”

“I’ll trade you a glimpse of mine for a glimpse of that.”

“What do ya say, sis?” asked Panama.

“Why am I trading a glimpse of mine when I don’t want to see any part of what he has?” China said.

“Come on, girls. Come on, let’s go look. You don’t want to do that first anyway. Liable to scare her more than she already is.”

Panama grabbed her sister by the arm and pulled her toward the door. “Let’s do it. There’s nothing to be scared of. He’s got it in a cage, with locks, and the cage is inside the wagon too.”

“No, I think I better do some now, beforehand, if I’m going to go.” China went into the bedroom and came back with a small plastic bag of white powder. “Give me yer key. We’ll just do a bump.”

Mr. Tunes reached into his pocket. He fidgeted for a minute and his eyes darted around the room, searching.

“I got something,” Panama told him. She pulled the knife out of her back pocket. They dipped it in the bag and each took two bumps, quickly snorting it back.

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“The last known survivor stalks his prey in the night,” Mister Looney Tunes incanted along to the song. “This sure is a good fucking song!”

Panama made a big sniffing sound and let it sink in. Her eyes got distant and hard. “Where’d you go if you could go anywhere in the world?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t go nowhere. I go where I want to be and here I am,” Mister Looney Tunes told her.

“I always wanted to go to Hawaii,” China said. “That’s where I always wanted to go.”

“You still got time. Find some fella to take you there. That shouldn’t be too tall an order.”

“You think?”

“Sure, people go there all the time. It’s part of America. It’s nothing.” He tilted his head back letting the cocaine glide down his throat, and gulped. “Get married and demand it as a honeymoon.

He’ll like it too. Hell, I wouldn’t mind going there myself. And with a good looking lady to top it. I’d spring for that.”

“I want to go to New York City,” Panama said. “Do my art there.”

“What!” Mr. Tunes squealed. “New York City’s full of Jews and niggers. Satanists and hippy freaks. You don’t really want to go there.”

“I sure as hell do!” she came back.

“Come on. There’s gotta be somewhere good you wanna visit.”

“I want to go live in Siberia,” Panama said, looking off into a distance underrepresented by the walls of the room surrounding them.

Mister Looney Tunes let up laughing. “Might as well go to Ten Buck Two,” he hollered.

“I wouldn’t mind going there too.”

“You can’t go there, girl. It’s not a real place. It’s an expression.

You know the phrase, ‘He went all the way to Ten Buck Two and back.’”

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“No,” Panama told him. “It is a real place. It’s not Ten Buck Two. It’s Timbuktu. It’s in Africa.”

Whether she was right or not, he didn’t know. But she sure seemed to know what she was talking about. And it suddenly surprised him that she knew something he didn’t, and with such clear certainty. Maybe she and her little girl were super smart and strange about it. The thought of her being smart made his stomach cramp up and scared him. He liked her, and had been wanting her bad for a good while. This smart business was making her feel even more out of reach to him than she already had.

“Why the hell you want to go on to Siberia and that other place?” he demanded.

Panama stuck her tongue in the side of her cheek and nodded hard, giving him a look like she was threatening him. But it wasn’t him she was threatening. It was something else she was threatening.

“I want to get out of this godawful hellhole. What do you think?

Those are the places that seem to me to be the ends of the Earth, and they sound as far away and as opposite this place as anything could be.”

He slanted his eyes at her disapprovingly. “That makes me sad, you talking like that. You don’t like it here, why don’t you just get up and go? Just go do that then?”

Something about this statement bothered her all the way under her skin. She couldn’t even look at him anymore, but turned her face away, a menacing expression spreading across it, directed toward nothing in particular. She lifted her fingers in the air and snapped them loud. “Why don’t I just get up and go? Just get up and go!” she repeated, vociferously. “That’s a fucking brilliant idea. You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?” She turned her face back to his, anger melting over her eyes. She ground her teeth and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “Well, then,” she said slowly, loudly, nearly pressing her nose to his, “I guess I’ll . . . JUST DO THAT THEN!” Mister Looney Tunes backed away from Panama. China picked Track One: Eye of the Tiger

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up the little white bag. “All right, you crazy fucks. Let’s see it,” she said, laughing and taking a deep breath.

Panama suddenly and inexplicably snapped out of her anger.

She pinched her nose and tilted her head back. “I’ll bet that thing’s really beautiful, boy. I’m getting excited about this.”

Mister Looney Tunes rubbed his hands together. “You ready then, ladies?”

“One sec.” China went back into the bedroom with the little bag. She stood at the mirror several minutes, fixing her makeup.

“Come on, get on out here, woman,” Mister Looney Tunes finally hollered. “That tiger don’t care what you look like.”

They headed to the door in a pack, Mister Looney Tunes taking the lead, and China holding tightly to her sister’s arm. “Now yer not gonna let that thing get us are you?” China asked.

“Naw! Now stop yer worrying. That thing’s gentle as a kitten,” he laughed. He opened the door and the three of them stepped excitedly into the driveway.

But they came to a syncopated halt as a cold air filled their lungs and fell out from their mouths. That ice cold air kept coming from them and seemed to occupy all the space all around them, freezing them to their deep insides.

The first thing Mister Looney Tunes noticed was the Rubik’s Cube still attached to the pile of keys lying in the gravel at the wheel of the wagon that sat directly in front of them. The Rubik’s Cube was done. Done perfectly. All the shades and patterns matched up, as did the two sides of white. “How the hell she do that so fast?” he said audibly.

China and Panama were not looking at the Rubik’s Cube or the key chain. They were looking at the girl with the unpronounceable name who was sitting on all fours in the open mouth of the cage. She was whispering in her strange way, her face full of joy.

The two open cage doors clanged in the gentle breeze against the metal bars. One, two, three, four, China counted in her head. Four deadbolts with keyholes and one combination lock. Mister Looney 34

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Tunes didn’t look anywhere but at the Rubik’s Cube. He just kept repeating, “How she did that so fast?”

But the women were looking somewhere else. They were looking into the eye of the void. And it was not black or spiraling as they had imagined it would be. It was like a sunlit storm, bushy and brilliant and muscled and void of any color, shining with an absence, white. Even at the center point, even in the eye, that emptiness did not fail. Even the eyes were shining, fierce whiteness. Shining not only with an absence of color, but shining with absence of the world as it was known to them. Whatever world was in the eye of the tiger, for them, it could only be an absence, an absence of caring for anything they had ever thought to care for. Not an absence of life, but at least an absence of their life was there. The absence of their life was there. Their life was shining at them in the whiteness of the tiger’s eyes as an absence.

The girl turned her also empty eyes to them, her lips coming up at the corners. Her face and cheeks were bursting her pure and strange happiness. “Look, mom,” she said, “it’s smiling.”

You know that phrase, good as gone? That’s what they were.

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track two

The Blue Mask

the two feelings were the same thing. She hadn’t expected

them to be, hadn’t expected to find herself holding the same worthless coin she’d always owned, looking, for the first time now, at the opposite side of it.

All of her life she had wanted to lose everything. She had wanted herself rid of all of it. She felt this wanting to lose as a burning sensation all through her skin, an unsettledness in her stomach.

Even when she closed her eyes, especially to the sunlight, it was a constant shifting dark spot that never took her anywhere but back and forth in spastic leaps, in slow motions, in circles, away from the unsettledness, up to anger, down to sadness, and back again.

She had wanted rid of all of it. Dreamed of some day losing, of shedding. She wanted to be rid of all of the things that made her bad, all the things that kept her from being the good she knew she had in her. That losing had always seemed possible, inevitable even.

She thought all she had to do was wait out her childhood and she’d lose it. She thought it would all fall away naturally, like bad blood spilling out of her; not the one of a series of many such bleedings, but all at once, and it would be gone. And she would be free. it should have happened ten months ago. That should have

been it, she thought. The marriage and the baby; that should have been the shedding, the end of it all. And it had been, somewhat.

Though everything bad had not fallen away, the want for losing 36

of losing had, perhaps, in a way, fallen from her. At least, it had changed form. The want of losing had been replaced, but with something far more sinister—the fear of losing. She was not accustomed to this fear. She had never had anything she wanted to keep, anything she wanted to be good for. This feeling came with the same burn and nausea as the other. But this was worse, because she could see no end to this feeling.

All her life, she realized, she’d been losing. And her only idea of how to win was to lose the losing. Now, for the first time, she realized that losing the losing meant keeping. But she didn’t know how to keep. She’d only had practice at losing. Now though, if she couldn’t keep, she would lose the keeping, which was just the opposite, more horrific side of losing the losing. Yes, the fear of losing the keeping was worse than the want of losing the losing.

She now realized that all her life before, which she thought of so awfully, she’d been living with hope. Now she was living with fear.

Wanting to lose the losing was hope. Wanting not to lose the keeping was fear. the baby was perfect . A girl, just like she’d always wanted. A

special girl with copper hair. Even living in such awfulness, Panama had always been special. Now her child was special. Her husband was even special. She hoped they’d have a special life. But something in her wasn’t sure.

The first thing that made her feel like they might not have a special life was his picking a house just one mile away from his parents. His parents hated her and she hated them. Not openly, but to the side of each other. Not hatefully but with pain and sorrow and questioning, with worry and absurdity and maybe love. But she didn’t feel their love for her as love; she only felt it as pity for her or as worry for their son. when she thought about his parents just one mile down the

road, it felt like someone was reaching up her skirt and poking Track Two: The Blue Mask

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at her in a crowd. She could feel them thinking about her, wondering if her house was clean, if she was drinking a beer, having visitors, smoking around the baby, and all sorts of other things.

Sometimes she thought she heard their voices in the distance, and on more than one occasion she’d seen their car slowing to a creep as it passed the house, their heads craning around and stretching out the windows, trying to see whatever they could in those few seconds.

They’d tried to show her more kindness since the marriage and the birth. When saying goodbye, they would pet her hair and hug her too long. His dad would get all weepy and tell her that it sure was a beautiful girl. But she couldn’t take any of their affections seriously, not after what they’d done at the wedding.

She hadn’t felt any shame. She wasn’t raised to give any real weight to the thought of maintaining her chastity until marriage. She couldn’t believe that they ever held any real hope that their twenty-one-year-old son might still be a virgin. But the sight of her, seven months pregnant in a wedding dress standing next to him in the church, had been too much for them. It must have popped their final thin bubble of delusion. But that still didn’t excuse their actions.

Just twenty minutes before the start of the ceremony they had burst into his dressing room on the edge of tears and begged him not to go through with it. She heard them through the walls. His father insinuated that he couldn’t be sure that the baby was his. His mother took it beyond offensive, into the realm of ridiculousness, insinuating that perhaps he was not aware of how babies were made. “You do know what you have to do to get a woman pregnant, don’t you?” his mother had asked.

He must have given her a look that said yes, because two beats after asking the question, his mother burst into a sobbing fit.

Why would she have asked him such a ridiculous thing? To Panama, his mother seemed like a woman who had only known keeping. She was afraid of losing her keeping her son young and 38

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safe. This was something that Panama found disgusting. In that moment, as she stood in front of the mirror, her sister weaving dyed blue baby’s breath through her braided bun, both of them silent and still, listening through the wall, in that moment she’d laughed almost loudly enough for them to have heard her. She was pleased at having overheard that moment his mother leaped into her own disillusionment, when her twenty-one-year-old son had assured her that yes, yes, yes, he did know how babies were made, and yes, he’d made one with that girl, that . . . type of girl.

All through the wedding, they cried. But it wasn’t any kind of wedding crying. It was straight out funeral crying. His mother held his father’s shoulder while she hiccupped and moaned into the floral-breasted bib of her dress. His father hung his head and pinched the bridge of his nose where his tears met his fingers, streaming down in one single flow like he was crying out of one big eye instead of two. He made sounds as well, hisses and snorts peppered by groans.

They pulled themselves together just after the preacher pronounced them man and wife. Panama turned to face the audience and couldn’t help but let her eyes fall on them. His father avoided her look. His mother smiled at her, actually smiled at her as if nothing had occurred. She smiled, her face wet and red, her eyes swollen as strawberries, as if this outburst was something necessary and normal, as if they were going to be friends now. But Panama never could shake that nasty feeling that covered her at that pivotal moment when her husband’s lips met hers and his mother let out her last hiccupping sob. the baby was griping. She crawled around on the green-carpeted

floor, a small stuffed pink ducky in one hand, the other hand opening and closing in the air, reaching toward her mother. Panama scooped her up in her arms and made Eskimo kisses on her nose.

The house was clean. There were no visitors. She was drinking lemonade. A cigarette sat burning in the ashtray near the open Track Two: The Blue Mask

39

window. Her daughter puckered her face, beginning to cry. Taking her daughter on her hip, she hopped over to the record player and flipped the needle onto the vinyl. The girl’s eyes caught hers, wide, surprised and suddenly happy. Lou Reed’s “The Blue Mask” came drum rolling and escalating to his just barely cantabile vocalizations.

She danced her daughter around the room singing along to the lyrics. “They tied his arms behind his back to teach him how to swim.

They put blood in his coffee and milk in his gin.” She held her daughter’s tiny hand and pumped it up and down as they hopped. The child squealed and smiled. “If you need someone to kill, I’m a man without a will.” She danced her into the kitchen to get the milk and Gerber’s.

“He thought he was a saint.”

“I’ve made love to my mother, killed my father and my brother. What am I to do?” she flicked down the volume and took her daughter to the

couch for feeding. The girl was two months short of a year and was already getting around on her own pretty well, even if it was on her knees. That gave Panama hope. She’d be independent and self-sufficient and she’d have somewhere to go. She scooped the little bubbles of mutilated apple from her daughter’s chin. Some sunlight and a breeze were coming at them through the window along with the smell of hot pavement and corn. A diesel truck passed down the highway going too fast for its size. The girl looked hazy and sleepy. She laid her back and stuck the bottle’s nipple to her lips. Panama hummed softly and jiggled the bottle. The girl gave a few sucks before falling away to sleep.

It was after five o’clock. He wouldn’t be back for another couple hours. She wasn’t used to all this time alone and she hated it. An urge came up in her to wake the baby. But she wouldn’t be any fun if she did that. She’d just be grouchy. She hoped she wouldn’t be out for long, but she knew the girl probably wouldn’t wake till Kevin made it home. She took the girl to the crib, lingering above her, stroking at her hair. A baby, a real babygirl.

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Panama stroked the girl’s face. With unconscious instinct, the child reached out, grabbed hold of her mother’s finger, and squeezed it tight like she might never let go. A pain shot Panama through the stomach and led all up her spine. “I’m gonna be good to you,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and let herself feel the girl’s small hand gripping hers. “No one’s going to hurt you,” she went on, her eyes closed, her head turned upward. She was praying it. in the kitchen , the dishes lay dry in the rack, reflecting the afternoon light. She tapped at them in boredom and wondered what to do with herself. There was no beer in the fridge, no whiskey in the cabinet. The TV wasn’t enticing to her. Her cigarettes were almost gone and her tube of “green paint” was empty. But she had real paints in all sorts of colors.

Her easel sat on the back porch, surrounded by her palettes and jars of turpentine. She was halfway finished with an oil painting, “The Last Battle of the Iroquois.” That was the title of the piece.

She’d torn it from a modern art magazine and was rendering it perfectly on a canvas five times the size of the print. Her painting looked exactly like the picture. That was a gift she had. She could draw and paint things exactly as someone else had done. She could follow their strokes with her eye and recreate them in any scale she wanted, adding only a hint of her own emotion, a subtle but sharp touch in her rendering.

Mostly, she was proud of herself about it, proud about the doing of it. Painting gave her a feeling nothing else did. Sometimes she worried, though, that she would only ever be able to paint things that someone else had already painted, only draw things that had already been drawn. It was harder for her with models. There were too many options for lines. Which lines were the ones that should be drawn, which lines left undone, implied, and then in what context should she set the model?

She was going to start a class in a few months at the local

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college. Not for credit, cause she still had to get her GED. But they told her that they could apply the credit after the fact.

As she filled in the flank of the leading man’s white horse, she thought about herself having college credit. The thought seemed abstract, impossible, and yet it was happening. In a few months she would be twenty-one and on her way to being the first person in her family with college credit. That shit don’t matter, though, she thought to herself. She didn’t want a degree for the sake of having a degree or getting a job. She wanted to be able to paint her own ideas well so she could make enough selling her art to go to New York and paint on the sidewalks or something like that.

This was a fantasy she went to often. She wanted to sit on the sidewalks of New York all day with a striped vest and a black cap and paint beautiful pictures on the concrete of the squares and courtyards she pictured there. She wanted the people to stop as they passed and oooh and ah and think how amazing the pictures were and how strange that they would be gone with the next rain. She wanted them to be perfect and gone with the next rain.

That’s real love, she thought, giving it all to the beauty of the thing in the moment of the thing.

There’s no “won’t” high enough.

Wash the razor in the rain.

She stirred the brush in the turpentine, watching the white paint spin like a tornado in the middle of the muck.

When Kevin got home, she didn’t have dinner waiting for him and he hadn’t expected her to. Either he would cook it for her or they would make it together. He came in quietly and found her on the porch. Her brush was lying on the easel half dry. She wore a thin, white slip dress, and sat “Indian style” on the chair, her skirt bunched around her waist. She was staring off into the distance, looking out over the yard and surrounding field as though she’d 42

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given up painting the canvas and taken up painting something on the sky with her eyes.

How much did he love her? It always burst him. She was his first at almost everything, and he didn’t see anything beyond her. He stood there taking her in. Her long, straight brown hair hung down her back nearly touching her waistline. Her chin pointed upward proudly toward the late sun. He saw it for a moment, that thing she always talked about that he thought was silliness, the distant soul of the Native American in her. She was a wannabe hippy and he was a wannabe punk rocker, wannabe cause they lived too far away from any place where any real movement ever happened.

There was no scene. They were the scene. They were the kids on the scene. Only now, they were the adults on the scene, as there was someone much younger than them they were responsible for.

The scene was here, right now, unseen by anyone but them. Here in this house where he stood with a small bag of groceries, sweaty from work in a Cramps T-shirt and blue jeans, watching his young wife paint raging Indians across the sky with her eyes. This was the scene.

This is no play you’re thinking you are in.

What will you say?

“Hunny, I’m home.” He said it ironically but she still cringed when he said it. He kept trying to joke with her. “What’s for dinner?”

“I guess we’ll find out when you make it,” she said, not turning to look at him.

He emptied the groceries out onto the counter and went to washing the lettuce. He was fine with making the dinner. He hummed a tune and tore at the leaves. She came up behind him, grabbed him by the waist and spun him around, pressing herself against him. He took her hips in his hands and let himself fall into her deep kiss.

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“You in an awful hurry to eat dinner?” she asked seductively.

“Are you thinking of having dessert first?”

She made a moaning sound and slid down, like a snake, all the way to his ankles and back up again, letting her hands run round his body, up his legs, to his chest, then to his crotch where she squeezed with one hand and tugged at his belt with the other. His eyes grew intense and hers more blank, distant, hard. Her mouth opened, almost dumbly, but it didn’t look dumb at all. She opened his pants and grabbed him in her fist, tightly, as he swelled into her grabbing till it was almost pinching. He was looking at her for some answer but there was no answer he was looking for to be found in her face. Her face was a void of answers. She had the answer she was looking for in her fist.

He told her he loved her and placed his hand on her cheek.

She tickled his tip with her thumb and moved his hand from her cheek to her neck, gripping around her neck, just under her chin.

It was not going to be sweet. It never was. It was good, he couldn’t argue that. But it had never, not even once, been sweet. Something about that fact disturbed him. He felt like she always needed him to be doing something to her, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, really, she was the one doing something to him.

That something she did to him always left him feeling unsettled about the world in general. He’d let her do to him that thing that let her pretend he was doing things to her though. There wasn’t much choice now. There was an electricity shooting in him. He grabbed her ass and threw her legs around him, carrying her that way into the living room, and dropped her down on the couch. By the time he got on top of her, he barely recognized her. Her face had completely changed. It was not something he could describe to anyone, but she did not have any look that belonged to any kind of civilized human being he had ever seen anywhere on her face.

His eyes had grown hard and serious as well, but they were looking at her for some meeting, some closeness. The closer he reached for her with his looking, the more distant her looking became, until 44

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her eyes were just two stones set drifting away on the ocean, and he was a little boy following them along as if he had cast them out there, wondering what would become of them, thinking mistakenly that their journey was also his journey. But their journey was not his journey. Those two stones would be gone from his sight in a moment, out to where the sun drank the darkness of the ocean depths, and he would still be standing on the edge of the sand, trying to imagine some kind of brilliance in their lonely falling.

“I want you to tear them off with your teeth,” she told him in a cold, hard voice, tugging at the back of his hair.

He grabbed her thin panties in his fist and tore at them with his teeth, breaking one side and letting them hang. She shoved his head into her and he sucked on her, letting the smell of her get in his nose. Many men he knew found it appalling. He loved it.

He loved it and a guilt of loving it crept up in him in the shape of his mother’s face, which he quickly chased away. He kept himself there, beating her with his tongue while he pushed her dress up past her chest and squeezed her breasts. She was craning now, hanging half over the arm of the sofa, backward and gasping. He sat up on his knees and paused to take in the sight of her. He was silent and still. She noticed his pausing. Tilting her head up to him, she gave him a questioning look that seemed angry. His pants were hanging down off him and his cock was out. It was hard, pointing up. She looked at it, then to his face with her cold eyes, then back to his cock. She scooted down to him, but he just kept looking at her.

His face softened and he thought of telling her he loved her again.

“I can do it without you,” she told him. Her voice could have been interpreted as seductive or menacing. It was a complete tossup. She put her hand on herself and let it go up and down in hard motions.

He took his shirt off and fell down on top of her. She pushed his pants off with her feet and he pushed himself inside of her. She told him, “Give it to me,” so he gave it to her hard at first and she pushed back hard on him till he made her yell and cringe, and she calmed, happy he had finally realized that this was, indeed, a competition.

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They kept on, but more slowly, his head buried in the crevasse of her neck, her eyes shut as if in sleep or deep meditation, her head hanging back. She kept one hand on his shoulder, holding him in a way that made her feel like he was her sweet child, something sweet she was holding that she wanted to be keeping but she didn’t know how to be keeping. And the sun was down now and everything was turning dark blue, and her orgasm came in that feeling she had when she was holding him like that, suddenly upon her, like a sweet child running up and pinching her in the back, surprising her and beginning to fill her with a jolt of startlement that sent pangs through her whole body. And somewhere something was laughing sweetly and the sweet sound of it filled her with a sickness because it was full of joy and the joy was laughing at the fear in her, and the fear in her was so big that it might not be contained, it might turn and take the sweet thing by the neck without thought and strangle it for startling her like that, so she clawed his back when she was coming and bit him and grabbed his hand and placed it around her neck, and moved herself hard against him, and almost against his will, he squeezed her neck, but he looked like the startled child choking, and he came in her then.

He looked at her with a daze all across his face and let his hand go from her neck and for the first time this night, she smiled sweetly at him and rubbed his cheek with her finger and kissed him softly and quickly on the mouth. He sat up and rebuttoned his pants.

She stood, pulled her dress down, and tossed the remainder of her underwear aside.

Everything had gone from blue to black. It was just now night.

The window was still open and the breeze coming through it had grown cold. He reached over and and shut it. He made his way to the record player and set Lou Reed from the middle, placing the needle with shaking hands that felt slightly numb to him now.

Dirty’s what you are and clean is what you’re not

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“Wooeeey,” she let out. “You want some beer?” she asked him.

“I’m gonna go grab some beer. You want one?” He gave her a questioning look that really pissed her off. “What? I can’t have a beer with dinner? You’re making dinner, aren’t you? I’ve been with the baby all day.”

He put his hands in the air. “I didn’t say anything. Sure. You need to go right now? Fine. Bring me back a beer. I’d love one.”

His last sentence had an aggressive tone and she noted it.

“What’s wrong with you? Most people would be relaxed after what we just did. You seem more uptight than before.” She laughed at him and came close, playing with his hair.

There was no pause between anything. He needed some moment of pause with her. “You’re coming right back?” he asked.

“What are you talking about? I’m just going to go grab some beer. You start supper. I’ll probably be back before you finish.” His eyes were full of heavy question. He scanned her face and stepped forward. She stepped away. “You got the keys?”

“They’re on the table.” He nodded at them and shoved his hands in his pockets. She scooped the keys up and headed toward the door. “Aren’t you going to put your shoes on?”

She swung the door open and turned to him, a beaming smile spreading across her face. “You should be more worried about the fact that I’m not wearing any panties than what’s missing from my feet,” she said, blowing a big kiss at him. “Baby, you worry too much. I’ll be back in a minute, and maybe, since all that didn’t work, a beer will loosen you up. Don’t burn the dinner.”

And she was gone. he couldn ’ t help feeling he’d been obliterated by a tornado.

But he tried to shake off him the feeling that was a feeling like dust clinging to his skin after getting caught in a dirt-field storm.

The car rumbled out of the driveway and the girl began to cry in the bedroom. He went in and scooped her up. She stopped crying almost instantly. She was such a happy baby when she was being

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held. He bounced his daughter lightly in his arms. She smacked at his face with open palms. “Daddy and you gonna make dinner for mommy, yes we is,” he told her in a mock baby voice. The girl pulled at his brown mop of hair and cooed. He was smiling at her with his mouth, but his eyes kept leaving the smiling place, looking sideways, worrying out the window. it was just three miles into town. The gas station grocery was

the only store still open where she could get some beer, except, she thought, for the drive-through liquor store, but she wanted a pack of cigarettes and some milk and eggs for the morning, too.

She drove fast down the highway with the windows open, wind scattering her hair to tangles and the fresh smell of the cornfield beating her nose. This was home. Car. Cornfield. Wind. She knew every inch of it and it knew every inch of her. One stop sign. Turn left onto the main road. Bump over the railroad tracks. Pass the flower shop and the Mason’s lodge. Pass the barbershop with the red-striped pole spinning endlessly through the night and the diner that closed down at eight sharp after dinner was all through. Turn right at the intersection, pass the bar, the church, and the other bar and the other church, the drive-through liquor store, the closeddown fruit stand and the American flag, twenty feet high, waving in the square.

She pulled into the gas station grocery. Two other cars sat in the otherwise empty parking lot. One of them, she recognized: a red pickup. It belonged to her cousin Cindy’s man. Cindy and her were cousins not like people were actually cousins, but cousins through some distant series of marriages and divorces somehow.

Her cousin Cindy was lying in the passenger seat with her head smashed against the window. Her cheek smashed up against the window like that looked like raw ham, and her hair all tangled around her face, Panama thought, looked like seaweed in an aquarium housing a piece of raw ham. Cindy was famous for her hair, jet black and straight, hanging all the way down to her ankles.

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She wanted it to drag the floor, like a cape, behind her. But no matter how hard she tried, she said, it just wasn’t willing to grow that long.

Panama leaned in and got a good look at her. She was out cold and some drool had collected in the space between the window and her mouth. Panama hollered her name, but she gave no response. She gave a tentative tap at the window. Cindy opened and closed her mouth like a fish but did not wake. She knocked on it one last time, hard. Cindy jumped, swinging her fists in the air at nothing. “I’m gonna kill you, you motherfucker!” she shouted unconsciously, her two fists hanging in mock battle above her mop of hair. She leaned back, blinked, and took account of her surroundings.

“Don’t shoot, hunny,” Panama told her. “It’s not the army, it’s just little bitty me.”

Cindy let her eyes focus on Panama’s face. “Well hell, hey.” She rolled the window down and leaned her arm over the door. “What you doin here?”

“Just gettin some beer and things. What are you doin, hunn?”

Cindy sucked on the inside of her lip and nodded hard, like she maybe was nodding to rock music that nobody could hear but her.

“I’m getting ready to go kill this motherfucker soon as Q-Ball gets done doing whatever he’s doin in there.”

“What? What’s got you so upset?” Panama smoothed Cindy’s hair down sweetly.

“I look like hell?” Cindy flipped the mirror open and went to combing her hair with her fingers.

“No. You look like you just woke up. What motherfucker are you going to kill tonight?”

She kept fixing her hair and spoke into the mirror. “I’m gonna fuckin kill Jerry, that’s who.”

“What? That guy? He’s as calm as a kitten. What’d he do to you?”

“He fuckin bit my fuckin birds’ heads off, that’s what he did.”

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“Come again?”

“Fuckin bit their fuckin heads off. Rock’n fuckin roll!” came a man’s voice from the door of the gas station. Q-Ball was just over six feet tall, skinny as pool stick with a mile-high red afro surrounding his red-bearded face. He wore brown bell bottoms and a psychedelic patterned polyester shirt.

“Man,” Panama told him, “you’re always dressed up to the nines.”

“You mean the tens,” he corrected her.

She shook her head, “No. I’m pretty sure it’s the nines.”

“I guess you’re dressed up to the ones, then, out here in a slip with no shoes on.” He swung his arms open and embraced her, plopping a slobbery kiss on her cheek.

“Watchyou doin?”

“Gettin some groceries.”

“Oh, that’s right. You’re a housewife now.”

Panama nodded and gave an embarrassed grin.

“I was just telling her how we’re gonna fuckin’ kill Jerry,” Cindy hollered, leaning further out the window. She pointed at Panama and shook her finger in the air. “When I see him, I’m gonna take his neck and twist. . . ” She started to make twisting motions in the air with her hands, but then an awful look came over her face like she had suddenly worn herself out. Her eyes rolled back and she leaned inside the car, resting her head against the back of the seat.

She mumbled lowly, letting her head roll gently from side to side, slipping into sleep.

Q-Ball leaned in and told Panama in a low voice, “Don’t worry about her. I gave her a Quaalude to calm her shit down.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and smacked the bottom of it on his wrist. “She was so fuckin upset! And she’s right to be, I’ll give her that. It aint right what Jerry did. That is one crazy duckling right there.” He hung a cigarette from his lips and lit it. Panama snatched another one from his pack and lit it on his match.

“Jerry always seemed nice enough to me. What’d he do?” she asked.

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“This wasn’t anything nice he did. This is some chaotic, unnecessary bullshit he did. I always got bad vibes from him.” When he said the word vibes, he stuck his hands out and wiggled his fingers like he was playing a piano. “He bit her birds’ heads off. She tell you that?”

“Yeah, she did. But I don’t get it.” Panama glanced over at Cindy who had been waking to fix her hair in the mirror, slowly, with very little effort, then falling into sleep again.

“What do you mean you don’t get it? You know Cindy’s birds.

Your sister bought two of them just last month from her.”

Cindy had converted the abandoned greenhouse in her backyard into a giant bird cage. She kept more than thirty birds at any one time, which she bred and sold as pets. Mostly small ones, except for one parrot that was all hers.

“Not Monty. You’re not talking about Monty?”

“No, hell! Not Monty. If he’d got Monty, he’d be strung up dying on this truck already.” Q-Ball gave his pickup a smack. It was old and red and some holes were rusting around the tires. “No. He wouldn’t dare touch Monty. We went to spend the weekend at the lake and, well, I guess she always thought of Jerry as a nice guy, too, like you. Though I don’t know, I thought you all were supposed to have female intuition, but I always got bad vibes from him. Anyway, we went up to the lake and she asked Jerry if he would look in on her birds and feed them while we were gone. He looked in all right. I guess he set up shop there, actually. He threw a big party there the second-to-last night we were gone. Invited some people over and got blasted right there in the birdhouse. Toward the end of the party, I guess he got all riled up. Started trying to act like a rock star. Put some loud music on and started dancing around like a wild man.”

Panama scrunched her face. “That doesn’t sound like Jerry. He’s never said more than two words to me at any one time. He’s gentle as a kitten. I always thought he might be slow or something.”

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know.” Q-Ball took his knife out and cut off the tip of his cigarette filter. “Anyway, he put on this new rock record that was just released. It’s all the rage. What’s it called, Cindy?” Cindy was snoring. “Whatever. So he puts on the record and then he started dancing around and hollering along and everything. People were clapping and cheering. You know, I think he just liked being the center of attention for once. But then, while he was dancing, just at the high point of the song, he grabbed two birds, her Cockatiels, one in each fist, and just like that, he bit their heads off. One after another. Bit one head off. Spit it out. Bit the other head off.

Spit it out too. Then he stood there with the headless birds in his hands, howling like a wolf, blood dripping from his chin. I heard it was some scary shit to see. Travis was there. He said two of the girls there started crying and ran out. Some of the fellas dug it for a minute, I guess. But then everyone left after that, cause they thought he’d really flipped it. He’s hiding out. He must know me and Travis and Eddy are coming for his ass. Her brother Eddy is protective as hell of her and he’s all fired up about it. We’re gonna go looking for him. I got to meet them in about twenty.”

Panama tossed her cigarette and ran her fingers through her hair, her mouth open in amazement. “Jesus Christ. What do you think got into him? He was trying to be Jimi Hendrix or something?”

“Hendrix would never do any stupid shit like that.”

“It was that Joe Red fella,” Cindy told them, suddenly twisting back into consciousness, and attempting to get her head out the window again.

“Lou Red, hunny. You mean Lou Red.” “Lou Reed?”

“Yeah, that’s it. His new thing just came out. That remord . . . remord—” She struggled for the word. “Record was still on the player when I come back, just going around,” Cindy told them, circling her finger in the air like the spinning record. “I listened to it. He aint even singing. He’s just yelling the whole time. Rahh Rahh Rahh,” she yelled, before her head fell forward.

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“I got it at home. Kevin just bought it. I really dig it. You don’t?”

Panama asked.

“Shit no,” Cindy scoffed, attempting to lift her head. “Shitfire.”

She blinked her eyes and swallowed hard. Having a strong opinion was quickly wearing her out.

“You want to smoke a blunt with us real quick?” Q-Ball asked.

“Yeah, all right.” Panama opened the passenger side door and helped Cindy scoot over to the middle. She was like a sack of potatoes falling all over the place. Q-Ball drove the truck around to the alley behind the store and lit up a big joint he passed between the two of them. Cindy was half asleep on Q-Ball’s shoulder and he decided she didn’t need any. Panama breathed in the thick smoke and stared at the back of the neon sign that read BUCK’S GROCERY & PETROL. On the other side of the alley, backyards of little houses extended, surrounded by trees and flower gardens.

She laid her head back and turned, staring off into the night.

Her eyes caught the dim light from one of the little windows covered by white lacy curtains. She let her gaze stay there, looking toward it but not really seeing it. Something stirred. In the curtains, something moved. She blinked. She could have sworn she saw a face there in the window. She sat up and focused. At first he was just a hazy silhouette. Then his features grew clearer.

Her hairs stood up and she opened her mouth. She was sure of it now; the face of her leading man, the one from “The Last Battle of the Iroquois,” was staring right back at her from behind that white lace curtain in the dim orange light of the perfect little white house. The man reached his hand up and pulled the curtain back, revealing the full beauty of his face. It was a stoic look.

His slanted eyes pierced her. His face was red, long, chiseled like stone. He was not young, but he would never be too old to fight.

She kept still. Q-Ball was telling her about something, but she wasn’t listening at all. Her leading man nodded to her from inside the window, reached down, and slid it open. He swung one leg and then the other over the window sill and stepped out onto the Track Two: The Blue Mask

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manicured lawn. He looked quickly left, then right, before slipping stealthily behind a tree. He disappeared for a moment, then dashed to the next tree, hid behind its trunk, then dashed to the next, then the next, until he was gone from her sight. She turned to look out the back window of the pickup, trying to follow him.

But he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Q-Ball tugged on the back of her dress. “Hey girl, what are you doing? You’re not having a freakout, are you?”

“No. I’m just thinking.”

“What are you thinking about?”

She turned herself back around and sat down. “You have any Indian in you?”

“Naw. Look at me. I’m all Viking. Raping Irish redhead. You know, Cindy’s half Indian. Her dad’s Sioux. She hasn’t seen him since she was about ten, though. I don’t guess she ever will again.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What made you think of that?”

“I’m just painting this picture, that’s all.”

Q-Ball started the truck back up. “You got Indian in you?”

“Yeah, some Iroquois.”

“Now I thought that was just like, well, when they all got together.

You know, when they banded. What was the original tribe?”

“I guess I was Cherokee.”

“Now, I thought they didn’t go with the Iroquois.”

She furrowed her brows in annoyance. He was always correcting her. “I guess I just don’t know anything about it then,” she said, perturbation showing in her voice.

He put the truck in drive and started pulling it back around to the front. “You better go get your groceries. You didn’t tell me if you wanted to go to that party with us tonight. You was having your freakout when I asked you.” Cindy stirred beside her.

“Oh shit.” Panama said, oh shit, but it didn’t really sound like cussing, or anything vulgar. It sounded sweet, soft, and certain coming out of her mouth in the tone she said it. She said it like she 54

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was remembering something, and that something she was remembering made her voice soft, reflective:“Oh shit.”

Right behind her car, just at the gas pump, she saw Kevin’s parents. His father was pumping BUCK’S PETROL into their shiny Toyota. His mother sat waiting in the passenger seat, rummaging through her purse.

“Stop the truck,” Panama told Q-Ball, frantically patting at the dashboard. “I gotta get out here. I gotta get out right now.” Kevin’s parents hadn’t seen her yet. She threw open the door and slid out, then shut it quickly, quietly.

“You having a freakout again?” Q-Ball asked her.

She poked her head in the window. “Listen, you meet me back here in fifteen minutes. Can you do that?” she whispered.

“What?”

“Just drive around or something and meet me back here in fifteen minutes, all right?”

“Fine, God. Everybody’s going crazy.”

She skipped up to the side of the store as Q-Ball pulled away.

She crept along the wall, like her leading man had done with the trees, and dashed through the glass doors of the grocery store, hoping they hadn’t seen her get out of the truck. A little bell rang as she entered. She glanced over her shoulder to check if she’d made it. Kevin’s mother was still rummaging through her purse, but his father, still at the pump, was looking right at her, his eyebrows pinched together. She was looking right back at him. They were clearly making eye contact and there was nothing left to do but acknowledge it. He waved at her. She waved back and tried to smile casually.

She picked up a hand basket and made her way down the aisles, the cold air on her shoulders and bluegrass music playing low in the background. The clerk was a high school-aged girl who stood up on her toes, raising a brow at the sight of Panama’s bare feet as she filled her basket. She was filling it with things she didn’t even need, so nervous she was shaking all through. She got two cans Track Two: The Blue Mask

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of lima beans and some canned beets and cereal. She turned the corner and tossed in a toothbrush and a can of baby food. She had made her way over to the cooler for milk and eggs when she heard the door open and close and the little bell ring. She stiffened and felt her hairs jump. He was coming up behind her. She heard his footsteps padding on the tile. She turned to find him standing right in front of her. The sight of his face made her stomach stir with sickness. He was so good. His face was smiling and uncomplicated and good. He had a long face with thick brown eyebrows. His hair was perfectly combed to the side and plastered in place with a ton of spray. His white shirt was ironed, as were his blue polyester suit pants, and his black shoes were shined. What could she possibly have to say to this perfect, polished man who was looking at her with a caring and concern that felt so much like an inquisition?

“Hello, Ben,” she said. He scrunched his face into something not really a smile and put his hand on her shoulder.

“You know you can call me dad,” he told her.

If he knew what that word meant to her, he never would have wanted her to call him that.

She nodded. Over his shoulder she saw the door open and close, and the little bell rang again as his wife entered. His wife scanned the store and found them quickly, a smile spreading across her face.

She wiggled her fingers at them as she bounced in their direction, hollering, “Hello, hunny,” in a giddy singsong tone, like a bird, the word hello lasting much longer than it should have. This was like Hell, Panama thought. Now she understood that phrase, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. “We thought that was Kevin’s car out there,” Kevin’s mother continued in her singing tone. “Fancy meeting you here.” She was smiling and bouncing, acting more friendly than usual. They must have been out having a good time, maybe even a drink. She was in genuinely chipper spirits. But then her eyes scanned Panama’s ensemble, landing quickly on her bare feet. She stopped dead still and adjusted her purse. Her face went through all sorts of battles with itself about which emotion to show.

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She grabbed her husband’s arm, unconsciously, as if for support, and she patted at her face with her hand. “Did you leave the house in a big hurry, I guess?” She tried to laugh, but it came out sounding maniacal, and she cut it short. Her husband just kept smiling at Panama with a calm, set smile that might as well have been painted on.

Panama wished they were people who cared about birds, like Cindy. She wished they had two little birds they loved dearly and that she had them in her hands right now. Now, just now maybe, she understood why Jerry did what he did. She’d never felt the urge before, but right now, more than anything, she wanted to be biting the heads off some birds.

“No. Not in any particular hurry,” she answered. “I’m just picking up some groceries for tomorrow. Kevin’s making dinner.”

“That sounds nice,” Kevin’s father told her. But she noted a slight emphasis on the word sounds. “You gotta get anything else?

Here, hunny, why don’t you take that up for her?” He took the basket out of Panama’s hand and gave it over to his wife. She looked relieved at being given some instruction for what to do next. She took the basket and headed briskly down the aisle.

“I just gotta get some eggs and milk,” Panama told him.

He reached past her into the cooler and picked out a carton of eggs and a jug of milk. She didn’t dare mention wanting to get beer.

They walked side by side up to the register under the fluorescent lights, the cold invading her skin. The clerk had already bagged the other groceries. Her “dad” told the clerk to ring the groceries up with his gas purchase, and Panama didn’t even try to tell him no.

She just stood there, feeling like a little girl, her arms at her side, with no idea what to do or say next. The two of them took the bags and she followed along behind them, out to Kevin’s car where they laid the groceries nicely in the back seat for her. “You go on home now and give Kevin and the baby our love,” he told her, looking with the kind of tender pitying smile she imagined nuns must give to lepers.

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pinched face as it leaned in to kiss her cheek. There was some real love there that she couldn’t help but feel. But it was not really love of her. It was love of what she held in her hands. As her husband’s father opened and closed the car door for her and gingerly gave the hood a pat, she realized that they were people who cared about birds, two little birds, more dearly than anything in the world. And she held those two little birds in her hands. all her life she ’ d wanted to lose her losing. That was the only way she could conceptualize winning. But that was still a losing.

She hadn’t realized that winning didn’t mean losing. Winning meant having, and having meant keeping. And all her life she’d only known losing. Her idea of winning, even, was really a losing.

She’d wanted to lose her losing. Now she had something that, if she kept it, it meant she would be winning, meant she would not be losing. She would be keeping, but she didn’t know how to be keeping. She didn’t even know if she wanted to be keeping, or who she would be keeping for if she was keeping. Was she keeping for herself ? Was she supposed to be keeping for them, his parents? She didn’t want to be keeping anything for them. And for herself—she didn’t know if she wanted to be keeping anything either, but even, if she did want to, she didn’t know if she could.

All her life she’d been losing. Even her idea of winning was losing, not keeping. Nothing in her life or thoughts of her life had ever prepared her to be keeping. she had to pull her car out before them. They were waiting

there for her like hawks and they would follow her all the way down until just a mile before she made it home. They would follow her. She was very stoned and she hoped it wouldn’t make any visible difference in her driving. She didn’t think it would. It never had. She passed the American flag, the church, the bar, the other church, the other bar, their headlights reflecting in her rear view mirror, like God, blinding her with their watching.

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She turned onto the road that led to her house. The cornfields extended from both sides of the highway into infinity. Just another mile and her husband’s parents would turn off into their nice, winding driveway, park their fancy car, and lay down in bed on their backs, side by side, till death did them part. Probably even in their sleep they would be smiling the positioned smiles of open casket funerals.

She was supposed to do the same now; return home with the groceries and smile with her husband over dinner, put the girl to bed, and fall easily to sleep beside him. Dinner was probably all ready and waiting for her. Kevin probably had the baby on his hip right now while he was setting the table. Music was probably also playing and she would have bet everything smelled really nice and her little girl was laughing because he was making goofy voices for her.

The wind she knew so well that smelled of grass and earth beat against her cheek, rattling the edge of the window. She looked out to the never-ending cornfields and the blackness of the sky poked through with brilliant whiteness. Something moved beside her. She caught it in the corner of her eye. She adjusted her rear view mirror away from their headlights. There he was, her leading man, the one from the painting. He seemed almost a shadow in the darkness, trailing them on his horse, beating down the cornfield, keeping a good pace. His feathered hair trailed behind him as he flipped a muscled arm back to pull the bow and arrow from over his shoulder. He had them in his sight. Now he was upon them, just beside them. He kept his aim steady, rising and falling with the rhythm of his horse, his bowstring pulled tight. “Go get em,” Panama howled out the window as he released the arrow and it flew right into the side of their shining Toyota. They slowed and turned into their drive, leaving darkness in her mirror. She let out a second celebratory howl. She saw the shadow of her leading man ride away into the distance.

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She was here, home. Home. Home, home. H.O.M.E. What a word, whataword. As she came upon the house, she pushed the gas pedal down till it touched the bottom. The road became a blur melting into the hood of her car. It was behind her. Her home was behind her and the word home was behind her, growing further from her by the second. It could never get far enough, that word, that thought, that prism that split her. That prison that kept her locked in reflection. One of the few four-letter words that did not roll easily off her tongue. HOME. The pedal was down and home was falling away. But something jumped in her as another word rose up before her. Nothing. That was what was in the direction she was driving. She slammed the brake pedal down and spun the wheel, squealing the tires like she’d seen in movies, did a 180, kicked it quickly into drive and sped on back the way she’d come.

There it was again. There it was. She passed by her home again, but only for a split second. q - ball was waiting for her at the gas station, puffing on the last of his cigarette and reclining on the hood of his truck. “Damn, girl,” he told her, “I thought you was splitsville for sure. Two more minutes and we would’ve been gone.”

Cindy sat in the passenger seat, now more awake, her parrot, Monty, perched on her shoulder. “Give em hell,” Monty croaked as Panama scooted in beside her.

Panama patted his green head. “How you doin boy?”

The parrot turned sideways and rolled his black eye around like an eight ball spinning. “If you need someone to kill, I’m a man without a will,” he croaked in a voice that made the words sound simultaneously demonic and absurd.

“That’s from that fuckin song!” Cindy hollered.

Q-Ball slammed the door shut and started the engine. “Don’t you worry about that. We’re taking care of that right now, aren’t we?”

The truck sped out of the gas station, squealing its wheels on the pavement.

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maybe jerry was slow . Or, maybe, he was actually very fast, so fast that everything around him seemed to move too slowly for him to make much sense of it all. Things were funny that way for him. Just a short conversation lasted days. Each word hung in the air and drifted at a snail’s pace over to him like shapes morphing in a lava lamp, nebulous at first, then slowly familiar, representing something, what was it? Oh yes, that. But he got the feeling that maybe things weren’t happening so slowly in actual reality for other people, because sometimes he would find himself contemplating the slowly metaphorizing form of an idea, and just as it was upon him, he would realize something else had passed behind it, the person he was speaking with was suddenly gone or on to something else that moved as slowly as the thing before.

He was fast, he told himself, like a fly. That’s how flies avoid the swat. They are so fast that, to them, the few seconds the hand takes to come from the shoulder to the wrist seem like hours, and they are gone before it hits. That’s what he told himself, that he was fast. But like so many things people tell themselves about themselves, it may be true in some non-platonic sense of the word true, but for all practical means and purposes, like shit and shoeshine, it don’t make much difference what it is if you don’t have the sense the good lord gave mules to distinguish between the two. Even if you happen, by chance, to pick the shoeshine over the shit, if that wasn’t a sure choice, your life probably won’t be any better than if you had picked the latter. Too slow for this world, or too fast for this world, either way, it doesn’t matter, because Jerry didn’t have the sense the good lord gave mules to distinguish between shit and shoeshine.

He was still wondering how the door got open by the time the cloth bag was over his head. And by the time he started contemplating the bag over his head, he was already tied and being carried sideways like a pile of wood, then tossed into the back of a pickup. It was a lot for him to try and distinguish the five voices occurring around him given the pain shooting through his head

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from when they’d conked it on the side of the truck bed when they tossed him in.

He heard four doors slamming and an old man’s scratching voice croaking out the words, “If you need someone to kill, I’m a man without a will,” which the voice repeated three times, in the same tone each time, sending a chill through Jerry as two motors started up and his body began to rock and bounce. He felt the truck halt, turn once, speed up, halt, then turn again in a big sweeping curve before it caught a steady speed, too fast for comfort on what he now figured must be an unpaved country road. He didn’t want to think about this anymore. He thought about the old croaking voice and the words that hovered above him. Although very few of them held any real meaning to him, they seemed somehow familiar in the order in which they were placed, and he felt that there might be some clue as to the nature of his current circumstances resting not so much in the meaning of them, but in the fact of them.

He was pondering this clue when the truck came to a halt. The smell of a bonfire filled his nose, accompanied by the sound of crackling and laughter. He felt three hard pats on his hip as a familiar voice proclaimed, “We’re gonna have us an ole cannibal-style barbecue. Yee haw!”

The truck bed door clanged open as four hands grabbed him around the ankles, slid him out on his back, and set him standing on the ground. He turned his head side to side and wobbled, but there was still only darkness to be seen as he breathed heavily from inside the cloth sack. Two hands were holding both of his arms, keeping him in place. His hands were still bound tightly behind his back. A voice came close to his ear and asked him, in a mocking tone: “Jerry don’t know where he is? Well hell, Jerry, do you even have any idea why you’re here?” He shook his head quickly side to side, and laughter from what sounded like a large audience ensued.

“You wanna know?” He shook his head yes; more laughter. “We’re having you for dinner, boy,” the man’s voice continued.

“Like you ate my babies, you crazy fuck!” a woman’s voice 62

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shouted, and he felt an open hand whack the top of his head. Jerry let out a wail and his face got wet. He sniffled audibly. “Are you fucking kidding me? Is he fucking crying?”

“The pain was lean and it made him scream he knew he was alive,” the old man’s voice croaked frantically, followed by the sound of a wretched cawing.

“That bird is freaking me the fuck out now,” another man’s voice came. “It knows more words than I do.”

“It’s from that fucking song,” another voice said. “It was in there with that song on repeat for two days.”

“They tied his arms behind his back to teach him how to swim,” the old man’s voice came again with its frantic, meaningless tone, and repeated the phrase three times.

A silence fell after that, and Jerry could almost hear the sound of thinking happening around him. He heard someone click their tongue.

“That bird’s a regular genius.”

He felt a third set of hands on his body, then another, then another, and he was being lifted off the ground and moved somewhere, forward, whatever forward meant without will or sight. The crowd squealed and hollered like they were all at a sports game sounding. “You know how to swim, Jerry?” a man asked him. Jerry wailed like a child.

“Don’t hurt him now, come on,” a woman’s voice came, but it was different from the first woman’s voice. The forward motion stopped, and he felt a rustling, a tugging at his side.

“Let go, Panama. We know what we’re doing. Calm down.”

“Panama!” Jerry yelled. “Panama! Help! Help!” The forward motion continued again.

“You better not hurt him bad!” he heard Panama yell. Then he was going down. All the men carrying him were going down and he was going down and they were all going down. They stopped going forward and he was being set down feet first into a wetness up to his chest. Then everyone was howling like in a sports game Track Two: The Blue Mask

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sounding and he was going up, up high, then he was going down, five sets of strong hands pushing him down, all the way under.

Then he was under and he was under and he was under. And there was no air or light or sound. There was only wet and feeling like choking, and holding of breath and darkness and wet. Then he was going up, up high, up high. Then there was splashing and two more sets of hands grabbing him, and the sound of people counting from the shore in unison. “ONE!” they proclaimed, as he was held up in the air gasping for all of it, trying to suck in all of the air from the sky before he was, yes, he was going down again, down all the way under, where there was no air and no gasping, only holding of breath and darkness, and there, suddenly, there was God there suddenly. And God was not kind. God was laughing, God was the sound of rushing water becoming laughing at his inability to breathe, and he was holding his breath and God was not helping, then he was going up, up high. “TWO!” they shouted, and then he was going down again. This happened ten times. The third time he found God again and God was not laughing anymore but God was the thing that helped him with the holding of his breath. The fourth time God was gone and he was gone and everything was gone and there was just nothing. The fifth and sixth times he was getting the hang of this and there was almost acceptance. The seventh time he howled and kicked when he was up high, high, high, and something metaphysical in him was dying and he howled like he was dying. The eighth time he forgot how to hold and started swallowing. The last two times he was just choking, and he knew that if this went on, it wasn’t only something metaphysical in him that would be dying, but also the physical part of him, it all would be dying. But on ten, it stopped, and he was just gasping and crying and there was no more up high, high, high or down low, low, low, no more swallowing or holding. There was just the middle again, the way he was used to, except his feet were still standing in the water up to his chest, but his head was out in the air, and his metaphysical thing that was dying felt like a flopping fish 64

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in his gut and like a frantic bird in his head, as they dragged him, limp-legged, to shore.

“The pain was lean and it made him scream he knew he was alive.”

“That fucking bird’s got a phrase for everything.”

He was tossed on the ground. The bag was a wet mask that was clinging to his gasping. There was a tug on the back of his neck and the bag was pulled off. He flopped on the ground like a fish and cried and gulped at air. Two sets of hands grabbed his shoulders and dragged him along the ground, set him up against a tree, and tied him to it. He was blinking through the dripping wetness, and things started to come into focus: the bonfire, the lake, fifteen or so people milling around. It had sounded like so many more when they were counting out against him. A face appeared in front of him. It was Cindy’s face. Her large, green parrot flapped on her shoulder as she leaned into him. “That’s what you get for eating my babies, motherfucker,” she said, with a look like she still wanted to kill him, like what had been done wasn’t enough. Then her bottom lip started quivering and she was crying. Q-Ball came up, took her by the shoulders, and walked her away.

Panama’s face poked in front of him next. There was a look of concern in her eyes.

“You okay, Jerry? You still breathing, aint you?” He gave a feeble nod. “You want some whiskey?” She held a cup up to him. He opened his mouth and she poured it all in.

“Why you being kind to that murderer!” Cindy hollered from across the fire. “You shouldn’tuh eaten her birds,” Panama told him, shaking her head. “I gotta get.”

And she got. Jerry just hung his head down and stared at the ground, his hands still behind his back, fastened to the tree. A few feet away from him, people milled around the bonfire, drinking and talking. He tried to block it all out, just let the fire dry him off.

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“Come on over here and lay down with me by the lake.” Cindy took Panama by the hand. They made their way a good distance from the crowd and laid down in the sand under a craggy tree.

Monty perched on a limb above them. “The pain was lean and it made him scream he knew he was alive.”

“Monty, stop talking that way!” Cindy hollered. The bird squawked, rustled its feathers, then tucked its head into its chest.

“That’s right, take a nap.” Cindy lit a joint and they sucked on it for a few in silence. They lay on their backs for several long minutes just blowing the smoke out their mouths like little geysers toward the stars. “I always think those stars look like men,” Cindy said.

“You mean the constellations?”

“No, I mean the individual stars themselves.”

Panama turned onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. “Cindy, I’ve been seeing somebody.”

“You seeing a man?”

Panama nodded yes.

“You been cheating on that sweet boy? Well good for you, hunn.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. I haven’t been cheating. I’ve been seeing this Indian man.”

Cindy scrunched her face. “Just because your husband’s white and he aint, that don’t make it not cheating. You’re funny. Think God rightly grants you one in each color, shape, and size?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m not fucking this Indian man. I’m seeing him. I’m seeing him everywhere. I just saw him tonight.”

“Is that where you took off to?” Cindy took a big hit and held it in so that her voice scratched when she spoke. “Let me tell you something about Indian men. The only thing that matters is, they’re men. That’s it. It don’t make any difference what tribe, what color, what name. A man’s a man, is a man. Wants one thing and once he’s got it, that’s it. He’s done. My daddy was an Indian man and it didn’t make any difference. Once he was done getting what 66

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he wanted, he was gone. You’ve got a sweet boy there.” Cindy chuckled. “You found what every woman wants, hunny. A man with the insides of a woman! Why are you giving that away?”

Panama shook her head, “You’re not understanding me at all.

You think Kevin’s like a woman?”

“I shouldn’t have said that, maybe. He’s not funny or anything.

And he is a hell of a handsome boy. If you don’t want him, I’ll give him a spin.” She passed the weed to Panama. “I’m just saying, he cares. He’s got real emotions. I’ll bet he even cries, and not cause he’s retarded, either.”

Panama sat up and leaned into Cindy. “This isn’t a man who’s Indian I’m talking about,” she said. “This is a real Indian!”

“Now what the fuck is that supposed to mean? What am I, a cigar statue?”

“Now calm down, jeez. You just called my husband a woman and you’re getting riled up? I’m trying to tell you, I’m seeing something, a man who can’t be real. An Indian man, but not like an Indian man today, but like from hundreds of years ago, with the paint and the horse and the feathers and arrows and all. He’s riding around all over the place.”

Cindy took the joint from Panama’s hand. “I think you’re done with this, hunn.”

“It’s got nothing to do with that!” Panama hollered. “This is real!”

“You just said it can’t be real.”

Panama combed her hair back with her hands. “What do you think we are?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think we’re more than ourselves? I mean, do you think part of you could be living as someone else and not know it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is some weed speaking right now.”

“I think I know what it is.” Panama’s face grew dark and serious. “It’s like he was born hundreds of years ago, but I think that’s Track Two: The Blue Mask

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not true. I think I know when he was born. This one time, when I was about ten or so, my dad was tearing into me real bad like he did. He knocked a hole in my head and a gash in my side and just left me layin there. I remember seeing all that blood running out and thinking God must have put enough blood in me for an extra person cause he knew this was going to happen. I think all that blood that ran out, I think it became another person. I think it became the man I’m seeing.”

Cindy sat up on her elbows. “You saying that the blood from when your dad beat you collected somewhere and grew into this old Indian you’ve been seeing riding around town?”

“Yeah. I am. That’s what I’m saying,” Panama said calmly, matter-of-factly.

“You know what I think about that?” Cindy asked. “I think, then, where’d the horse come from? Couldn’t have been enough blood to make him and the horse too.”

Just then, they heard an unearthly howl let up from where the bonfire was burning. Monty flapped his wings from the branch above them and screeched toward the fire: “Please don’t set me free!

Death means a lot to me!”

The sky was clear, reflecting in the dark lake, and the two women were turning their heads, startled, as the speaking bird seized and cawed above them from the dark, silhouetted branches of the craggy tree. “Death means a lot to me! Take the Blue mask down.

Cawk! Death means a lot . . .”

Cindy grabbed the bird and stepped out from around the tree, peeking up near where the commotion was coming from.

“What the hell?”

The faces of the men and women all stood still for a second like in a tableau, staring expressionless into the horrified face of the park ranger who stood just behind the open door of his rover. He turned his head to scan the faces of the people around the fire as Jerry kicked and continued to howl, struggling with the ropes that bound him to the tree. Someone had apparently found some blue 68

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paint and thought it was a good idea to dump it over his head.

His face was all streaked with blue. And apparently someone else had figured out a fancy way to double-fold duct tape and make it sticky on both sides, so that Jerry had been given a crown of sorts, made of tape and beer bottle caps. “Help me! Help me, officer!” he howled, and then continued to wail incomprehensibly.

The ranger paled as he took out his walky-talky and began speaking frantically into it. A few of the statues snapped out of their frozen positions and got the foresight to run toward their vehicles.

Then all the others got up and started running to their vehicles too. The ranger pointed and hollered for them to stay put, but they were not listening. During the commotion, Cindy’s brother Eddy made his way over to Jerry and pulled his knife out. Jerry howled and kicked when he saw it, and the Ranger was yelling at him, real serious, to “put down the weapon.” Two of the cars started up, and the officer was yelling at the drivers to get back out of their vehicles and yelling at Eddy to put down the weapon, back and forth. Far off in the distance, the sound of sirens started up.

Eddy took the knife and cut the ropes that tied Jerry to the tree.

Then he took the rope in his hand and tugged it hard, like a leash, as Jerry howled and flailed away from him. “We wasn’t doin nothing, was we, buddy?” Eddy hollered at Jerry as he led him toward the ranger, the leash in one hand, the big knife in the other. “Tell him. Tell him we weren’t doing anything, we was playing a game.

Tell him,” he said, shaking Jerry by the rope that bound his hands.

“Sir, release your hostage and put your hands in the air.” The ranger spoke into his megaphone even though Eddy was just a couple of feet away. Eddy didn’t like the sound of the word hostage.

And he was suddenly very thankful that park rangers didn’t carry guns.

“Hostage? I’m not holding him hostage!” Eddy said.

“Sir,” the ranger continued, “let go of that man and put your hands in the air.”

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he really held some notion that the ranger would suddenly see his point. “If I let go of him, he’s gonna freak out.”

The sirens were coming from just a few yards away. Two cop cars were barreling down the dirt road that led to the lake, lights swirling and horns blaring. One came to a dusty screeching halt just feet away from the ranger’s vehicle. Eddy let go of the rope and put his hands in the air. When he did this, Jerry did, in fact, freak out. Two cops jumped out of the car, one pulling his billy club, the other with his gun in front of him. Jerry came barreling toward them, his face blue below his crown of duct tape and beer bottles, howling and running with his chest puffed out, his shoulders wiggling. “HEEEEELLLLPPPPP!” Jerry howled, just before the first cop brought the club down on Jerry’s head. Jerry fell to the ground, unconscious.

“Arrest that man,” the ranger said into his megaphone, pointing at Eddy. Eddy got a few good leaps of trying to run away before the two men tackled him to the ground.

The other cop car had turned back around on the road and was attempting to chase down the vehicles of those who had already started driving away. “Everyone just stay where you are. You are all under arrest,” the ranger boomed to the five or six people left who were still trying to figure out their next move.

Q-Ball managed to duck behind the trees and took off at a dead run in the direction of Cindy and Panama’s receding shadows.

The three of them ran along the beach, the sound of sirens growing all around them. Panama was in the lead. “There!” she heard a police officer yell. Her hairs jumped away from her body. She turned into the darkness of the woods. The tree limbs whipped her face as she pushed her way through fast as she could. She heard the branches cracking as Q-Ball and Cindy made their way behind her somewhere. The blue lights were flashing through the trees and the horrible yowling of the sirens seemed to surround her. Her feet were bare and the sharp twigs and things were cutting them as she ran, leaping, animal-like, faster than most people could run with shoes on in the dark forest. She knew the woods. She knew the 70

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feel of running from something too big that chased her through the darkness and the feel of wet, cool soil on the bottoms of her feet that seemed to heal the little scratches as soon as they were cut.

“Stop in the name of the law!” She almost laughed out loud when she heard it. She couldn’t believe anyone would actually say that outside of a movie. Behind her, she heard what she could only guess was the sound of Cindy and Q-Ball being tackled by cops.

She heard Monty crowing frantically, “I get a thrill from punishment.

I’ve always been that way.” Cindy moaned loud as Monty repeated the words. “You are permanently stained,” the bird continued.

“Get off her,” she heard Q-Ball yell.

Something wild in Panama jumped and she jumped with it.

She gave four big leaps that took her further away from the big thing that was tackling behind her in the darkness. On the fifth big leap, she lost her balance and fell flat to the ground, knocking her head on a rock. Her chest and face were all covered with dirt and everything in her stopped to breathe. It stopped to breathe only for a moment before she was pushing herself back up to run. But just as she made it upright, everything in her stopped breathing again.

The first thing she saw was a feather hanging down, and then she saw the black eye of the horse, and then she smelled him. He smelled like sweat and dirt, like her. He was, as she had always known he would be, stronger than anything anyone had ever known. His face set as chiseled stone, like reddish clay. His eyes did not look sad or sorry for her. They were filled with some certainty she could not define, the same cold, set certainty her eyes took when they became cold, set stones when her sweet husband tried to fuck her the way she wanted, pretending he wasn’t making love. Her leading man held out his hand to her. Standing tall as he did on the horse, that hand looked like it was reaching all the way down from heaven. She took it. He pulled her up behind him. She wrapped her hands around his waist as he shook the horse by the hair, and they took off through the darkness of the trees.

It was a steady pace that held her in peaceful silence. The Track Two: The Blue Mask

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pounding of the hooves was peace and there was grace in her escape as they made their way out of the woods, riding steady on the sand along the edge of the lake, the stars in the periphery, the stars that looked like men. She closed her eyes and pressed her head against his back. The feel of his bare skin against her made her feel whole, made her feel like she was holding herself, like she’d got back some kind of certainty and strength she had lost. She didn’t know where he was taking her and she didn’t care where they were going as long as she was riding in that steady rhythm with her strong certainty in her arms.

The steady rhythm of the horse finally stopped and she didn’t want to open her eyes because she hadn’t ever wanted it to stop and she didn’t want to be anywhere if she wasn’t riding in that steady rhythm with her strong certainty in her arms. When she opened her eyes, she was in her backyard. She could see through the windows that a light was still on in the living room, even though it must have been well after two in the morning. Her leading man turned his head and set his hard eyes on her. She shook her head no at him and held him tighter, but he wasn’t arguing. He just stared at the house. She swung her legs over the horse and slid down.

She tiptoed up to the kitchen window and peeked through.

There was her sweet husband curled on the couch next to the lamp. His face didn’t show it much, but she could tell he had been crying. He was now deep into sleep, but a look of pain still traced his mouth. She looked back at her leading man on the horse. He gave her a long nod. She opened the door and slipped in quietly.

She crept past the living room archway, into the bedroom where her babygirl lay sleeping.

She looked down at her little daughter’s round face, peaceful in the moonlight. She twirled her hair around her finger. She could pick the baby up and creep out, or she could sneak into the bedroom and sleep if she wanted to, and maybe he wouldn’t even say anything to her in the morning.

She leaned down and smelled her little daughter’s head. It 72

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smelled like powder and sweet flowers. “I’m no good for you, baby,” she whispered. “You gotta understand.” all her life , Panama had been losing. She had been losing before she was even born. The fact of her birth was a losing for her family—losing more of what little money, space, and time they had, but they were used to that by the time she came along.

All her life, Panama had been losing. She wanted to make her babygirl a box with all the things she had lost inside it and give it to her so she would understand when she was older. First she lost her voice with screaming, then she lost her little teeth, then she lost her red candy inside her that an old man took and told her it was his forever cause it could only be taken once and he took it. Then she lost her clean bare skin. Then she lost her idea of herself as human. She lost that at school. At school everything was always losing. Everything she lost at school would just be a gray rock with the word shame scratched into it. Then she lost her standing too many times, when she was knocked over too many times by an angry fist. Then she lost her trust in anything. Then she lost her speaking to clean people. Then she lost her blood. Then she lost her blood. Then she lost her blood.

Something dawned on her then as she was crying quietly and twirling her daughter’s hair in her fingers. She realized that all her life, she had been keeping. She had been keeping all the things she had lost, and that’s all she knew how to be keeping. If she stayed, she thought, that’s all her daughter would be keeping, a horrible jewel box of blood and torn hair and bruises and stones and stolen candies. She didn’t know how to be keeping anything that she wasn’t losing or hadn’t already lost. The best way to keep her little daughter was to be losing her. Then she could keep her girl like she’d kept everything else she had lost. Like her blood. She had lost her blood and it had come back for her somehow.

She leaned down and kissed the girl on the forehead. “Goodbye,” she told her.

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The moon looked like a giant pearl in the sky, gleaming on them as she slipped the window open and slid out. She tiptoed along the cool grass toward her leading man who stood waiting for her on the lawn. He pulled her up behind him and looked at her for direction. She pointed toward the field, toward nothing. He tugged at the white horse’s hair. It took off in a slow gallop at first, until it hit the field, where it reached a good speed. They rode away beneath the moonlight, catching a steady rhythm, like blood pounding in the skull, that unconscious rhythm, that escape, that losing she knew how to be keeping.

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track three

News of the World Pa r t O n e : A l l D e a d , A l l D ead i try not to think about death anymore, but used to be that’s

what I was doing most of the time. I guess death is quiet, and I guess before I even knew I was thinking about it so much or had it in me so hard, I guess I did. I guess that’s what I was thinking on, cause used to be I was quiet as a before-the-storming sky and the birds were singing each time I come around cause they heard the rumbling inside me. It was all quiet, quiet, quiet. Then there came that red moment. Then there came that red moment of the death and in that red moment nothing was quiet. In that red moment everything was screaming.

For a good while after the red moment there was just quiet and then suddenly screaming and quiet and then suddenly screaming and that’s why they put me in the white place.

In the white place, it wasn’t so quiet. It was all singing—singing and clapping—and when I didn’t want to be clapping they took my hands and did my clapping for me. Then sometimes there was grabbing and scratching and tiger growling then, and then there was tying and rocking and then I did some singing but on my own, singing my own story like a song, like a crow crooning, echoing through the white place. Then there was growing, years of growing in the rocking tying white place and singing alone. Then they give me back and suddenly things became words again. Words I could speak to tell them. they give me back and I go to my grandma’s house. I find out

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my grandpa died while I was in there. I find out I got brothers and sisters, but I can’t see them till the screaming aint sometimes but never. That’s why I can’t live with Daddy, cause he’s got little ones I might be scaring. Daddy comes over sometimes and shows me pictures of his new family and everything looks happy for him, but I’m growling sometimes and that scares him so he don’t come over often, except on Sundays to take me to church with Grandma.

In church I’m singing so loud. I’m singing so loud and always in pretty dresses with red braided hair. If I’m not singing, I’m trying to be quiet cause I know I’m strange, and I don’t want to go back to the white place for strangers.

One day Grandma made me a cake with thirteen candles on it I blew out and everybody clapped. I didn’t like the clapping so I went tiger clawing, then Daddy stopped coming even on Sundays and I practiced quiet again for a while. I even learned to write long quiet words that stay, better and better. Then they made me a cake with fourteen candles I blew out and nobody clapped, and we ate the cake with Daddy’s little kids who looked like me and his wife who didn’t and that was a day we played. But after that it was real quiet then, too quiet, except for the church singing.

That house was all lonely then, far away from everything except the woods and the road. Grandma was giving me things to hold up the new parts that grown on me and plug up the old parts that started leaking sometimes. She was always looking worried about something. She was quiet and I was quiet, so quiet I could hear the sun heat hitting the house and making clinking noises in the windows’ prisms like bells that chimed at different hours of the day. Even as it passed over the sky, it were all so quiet I could hear the sun passing. I could hear the moon moaning when it waxed and waned and the sound of dew falling on the grass and drying in the dawn. I could hear the stars burning and borning and dying.

I could hear Grandma breathing in her sleep down the hall and when she woke, I could hear her eyes shifting. I could hear her heart beating from across the room. It all gave me a painful feeling 76

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inside, hearing all the chorus of the world going on without me, and without her too. I knew she was keeping quiet for me like I was keeping quiet for her.

So right before they could make me eat my fifteen candle cake I snuck out through my window in the night and ran. When I was running, I was howling and singing through the woods. I was a running howling streaking sound and all the other sounds were not so loud but just accompanying mine.

It weren’t so hard to find a place to be. Some old storage shed with trees and things all grown up around it where I made my place. I made a fire hole in the ground outside and cleaned it all up nice and hung flowers and berries and butterflies and bird bones and things I dried and ate on it, on my place. I sang every day when the sun come up and I started working my jaw out, telling myself all the stories I wanted to tell myself and talking with myself about questions and things I was doing. I found a way then to keep the death out by makin my noise, just let my jaw go and there was life coming out. I decided life was singing, and all my life’s a story I could be singing about. Every time I’m yakkin I’m cawing, that’s crooning. That was just fine by me.

But they wouldn’t let me be there. They never do. I guess it was weeks or maybe even months, but what did I care about stuff like time there in that way near the creek where I was? They was scared, said kids was afraid to come into the woods, but I never seen no kids, and that the people in the town thought I was some crazy witch woods lady or goblin or some such thing, but I think they came up with that really after they got me.

They come with dogs and sticks and badges and I started growling and screaming and clawing and tossing up dirt and running, but they got me. They put me back in the white place, but I didn’t want to stay, so I let my jaw work and told them everything I think and told them none of their pictures looked like tigers anymore, though they all did. But that talking got me out quick, quick; quicker than quiet.

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They gave me back to Grandma and we was still again for a few. Not long though, not long at all. It was past time for my sixteen candle cake, though I never ate it, and Grandma was cooking at the kitchen counter and I just couldn’t think that I could stay there and stay quiet anymore or that I was doing any good for anyone. So I packed up my bag and didn’t even try to sneak, but just walked out the front door when the sun was up, with my big bag and her chopping in the kitchen. And she looked at me and looked sad, cause she knew what I was doing, but she looked relieved too.

So I went to the road and walked, and then after a long while of walking, I hold out my hand and climbed up into a big old truck, and go, go, go. I went.

Pa r t Tw o: Spr e a d Y ou r W i n gs . . . F ly Away the woman driving the truck looked like she was a part of

the truck the way she was built all square and hard and oversized.

She asked me my name. When I told her, she just looked at me like I was crazy, then she told me her name was Helen. Helen told me what she do; all she do is drive this truck. She says that when she was little she was a TV star in Russia, then she come here to get away from the government with her family and learn how to speak English and married and divorced and changed her name to something more American. Now she just drives this big truck we’re in. Helen started telling me old stories and I was singing her songs for hours and hours. Then we come up on the big bridge over the river. I see that big silver arch, and I thought that was something strange to see. She says you can go all the way from one side up over to the other like you’re riding a big silver rainbow. Stuff like that don’t get me so much anymore, but the first time I saw it, it was really something. She said she’d buy me dinner. We pull off the road before the river. The place she buys me dinner had naked girls dancing around our table. While I was chewing on my burger, 78

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they’re spinning strings in my face. At first I was shy, then one of them strings tickled my cheek and I started laughing, then I just kept laughing the whole time and couldn’t hardly eat. When they come around us again, they was laughing and acting silly too. we left that place and she tells me she’s going to bed and that

I can stay in the motel with her if I want. I don’t have no place to stay, so I want to. The first time someone touch me that way it was Helen. I felt like there was some new animal inside me coming out, an animal that wanted to be tearing without killing, but something was dying, cause it was bleeding. She gets real scared about the bleeding, telling me she’s sorry, and I’m just laughing and she tells me she loves me. She tells me she loves my thinness and my long red hair, how country-belle I am and how crazy my eyes are. I must have really looked like something else then, something that coulda been milking cows and tying flower necklaces by barns going crazy. in the morning , she tells me she got somewhere to go I can’t go with her to. She tells me she’ll be back in two weeks and she’ll pay for me for a motel till then if I promise to be in it when she comes back, and I know what she means. I promise I will. She paid the motel and leaves.

The next morning, I wake up alone and start thinking about how I got no money, no food, and I can’t get food here like in the woods, cause the trees look sick and everything’s concrete and dirt fields. I keep looking over that river, seeing everything all big, sparkling, and shining over there. I keep thinking how she should have left me there on the other side.

Outside the motel, there’s a school and a playground where the kids are all squealing loud. Right next to it, there’s a strip of stores with pictures of ladies all looking very surprised at something, showing most of their secrets. So I go into one of those stores thinking maybe I’ll have to be sneaky and steal something to eat, but there’s no food there, there’s just things that I didn’t know what

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they was then but I do now. I start poking around them, picking them up and finding things that seem to fit together and putting them together, cause I was curious and didn’t have nothing to do.

While I’m pokin things in each other, this ole boy comes up and say he owns the place and am I looking for work for good money.

He asks me how old I am. I tell him and he says where’s my mom? and I say dead, and he says where’s my dad? and I say I don’t know, and he says if I work for him I have to say that I’m older, and do I have a place to stay? I say I do, that I’m living with someone around here, cause I don’t want him to think I’m alone. He goes and gets this woman from the back. She takes me back to the back with her and combs my hair and braids it in two little braids on each side and puts me in an old timey type dress that isn’t really old timey, cause it too low on top and too high on bottom. She gives me a pink sun umbrella and a parasol, but I don’t know why, cause there was no sun where they put me. It was a bare light bulb on the ceiling, that’s all, and some flowery wallpaper and a red bench. I sit on it there for a long, long time, but she told me that’s all I had to do, so that’s all I do.

After a long time sitting and thinking about I don’t know what, but not about tigers, thinking about everything but that, then I hear a clicking sound. The wall in front of me like slides open. In the dark there, I can see a man sitting there, but the space between us seems dirty, and I realize there’s something between us, like a window, like glass. The man looks like he’s smiling at me, like he’s real surprised about something, like those ladies in the pictures outside. He opens his pants. I can see his thing. He started pulling on it. Then the window was closing again, and he looked all upset and started fidgeting on the wall beside him. The wall opened back again. He kept pulling for a few seconds, then the window got wet and he was out of breath, leaning back with his eyes closed and the wall shut again.

That lady comes in and asks if I’m all right. I nod yes. She says I’m doing a good job, to just keep doing what I’m doing and she 80

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leaves. I think, I wasn’t doing nothing. So I just kept doing it, and the whole thing happened over and over again for hours like that.

It give me time to think, sitting there holding my sun umbrella.

After a while, I didn’t even notice those ole boys pulling on themselves or them changing faces, I was just thinking about where I been and where I might be goin; about what people are and why they are and such. Finally the lady come and told me it was time to finish. I change back my clothes and they give me a hundred and twenty dollars cash which was more money than I ever had.

So then it was real late night almost morning when I went to the diner and ordered so much food, like fries and two burgers and a sundae with everything. Then I went and slept until it was time to go hold my sun umbrella again, and that’s all I did for two weeks.

By the end, I was getting fatter and I had some money saved. helen come back after those two weeks, so I tell the lady and

the ole boy that run the store that I gotta take off a day. Helen acts like we known each other forever, like I’m already hers, or something she’s been courting. That night, Helen takes me out to some nice place with wood tables and candles and deer heads on the wall. She buys me a steak and sweet wine, which I aint never had.

She put on a collared shirt and new jeans and all. We talk at dinner and she keeps telling me she sure does love me and how she’s got plans for me, and am I doing all right? I told her I got a job and I told her doing what. I didn’t know it would, but that makes her real mad, real mad. She tells me I can’t do that no more. I say, why not? It aint even doing nothing and I gotta eat. She says she’ll pay for my food. I say she done enough with the hotel, that I gotta have my own money too, and it aint even really doing nothing anyway.

I say that I won’t do it much longer, cause I aint planning on staying here forever anyway; that I want to go live under that big silver arch where it sparkles. She gets real weird then and asks if I will still want her around then. I say I don’t know why not as long as she stops yelling at me. Then she ordered me some cake and fed it Track Three: News of the World

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to me and drives me back to the hotel, being all quiet like ladies get when they mad and scared.

We get back to the motel and make it a couple of times. After, she’s real quiet and keeps saying bad things about what I’m doing for money and all and she sleeps with her back to me.

The morning comes. She rolls her big, smiling self onto me like nothing happened. We make it some more until I tell her I gotta go to work. She did something then I couldn’t believe. She stood up and locked the door, saying she aint letting me go nowhere. She says that aint no work for a young, sweet girl like me and all and that she could get me a job at the diner. I said I don’t know nothing about food. And she asks, what do I know about dick? Real mean.

I say I don’t know nothing about that either, but all I gotta do is sit there and think and it’s helping me with my philosophy. We keep arguing like that till forever. She won’t let me out the door. She stands in front of it when I try to go and looks mad.

After forever passed, I hear a knocking at the door. Helen tells me to be quiet. She asks who it is. It’s the ole boy from the store. He sounds mad. He asks, “Is that girl in there?”

“What the name of that girl are you looking for?” Helen asks back. She sure is a tough one and I’m sure she sounds tough too. She’s pressing her ear to the door, listening with her face all scrunched up mad.

He doesn’t say nothing for a minute, then he says, “I’m looking for the redhead.”

Helen gets all mean and says, “He doesn’t even know your name. How about that?”

I say for her to shut it cause she can’t say it either, Russian talk or not. Then I holler out that I’m in here.

He starts hollering that I didn’t ask for two days off, just one, and he’s losing money now and didn’t he treat me good and don’t I need the money?

Helen opens the door. They start screaming at each other. She’s sayin I’m just a kid and she’s gonna call the police. He says who 82

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is she to me? And she says she’s my girlfriend, that’s who. Does he have a problem with that? He laughs and says, no but the cops might have a problem with that too if she calls em. Then she sees she made a mistake and gets quiet. He asks, calmer, do I want to go to work or not? I say I do. Poor Helen looks so defeated. So I tell him I’ll be there in a minute, but I need to say goodbye. He says if I’m not there in fifteen, he’ll come back and escort me. Helen flips him the bird-finger and he goes.

I give Helen a big hug then and a big kiss too, cause she looks like she just lost a war. I tell her I understand if she don’t want to pay the motel no more, but she says she does, that she’ll leave tonight and be back for me in a week and that then she’ll find me a place to stay on the other side of the river so I won’t have to do this no more. She gives me a number to call her anywhere she is in case something happens. She says sometimes it don’t work, but to leave a message, and she loves me and all. Then I go. that night sitting there , it weren’t the same as before.

Before, I didn’t even think about it. There weren’t nothing wrong with it. I was perfectly happy just sitting and thinking my thoughts.

But after everything bad Helen been saying to me, it give me a nasty old feeling when that first ole boy sits down and starts pulling.

It didn’t feel like I weren’t doing nothing anymore. It felt like I were doing something, something real bad.

Helen done gone and mucked up my head, that’s what she gone and done. She went and got my head all mucked up. I tried to push all the bad words and things she was saying about me and what I’m doing out, but they wouldn’t go. Couldn’t even get my thoughts back on people and why they are and all. I got all upset and start thinking about tigers, which is no good for me. Then I’m rockin and some ole boy’s pulling and I look up, and it look to me like my pink sun umbrella’s all dripping with blood, like it’s raining blood, and the blood’s running off my pink parasol, and I’m worried the little glass room I’m in might just fill up with blood. I start Track Three: News of the World

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thinking I’m the tiger in the cage and the blood around me must be my mother’s blood and the blood I ripped out the others. Then I guess I must have gone wild, cause that woman come in the room and get me out.

She asked me if that’s a new performance piece I’m working up, and do I want to try it with a cat outfit? I say no. I say it’s not good for me to be thinking about tigers. She looks at me worried then. She sit me down and sit down with me at this old makeup table in the back. It’s covered in dust and ashtrays, and a lot of the bulbs above the mirror is burned out. She gives me a shot of whiskey which I aint never had before then. I like the way it feels.

It burns real good like it burning all the bad stuff out. She asks if I want anything else. I say a chocolate. She pet my head and looked sweet, telling me I sure am a baby thing. She give me some chocolate and a hug, and she tells me not to worry, cause there’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing. She do it herself before too, and I don’t think she’s a bad person, do I? I look at her with her hard face and sweet eyes, her short brown hair and big makeup and how pretty she is, and I say no, she’s a good person. She gives me a chocolate. While I’m suckin on it, she keeps goin on. She says lots of people in the world makin money in bad ways and at least what we doing aint hurting nobody. I don’t know what she means. She pours herself a shot of whiskey and down it hard then pours herself another. “This is all you need,” she tells me. “This is the good stuff, best stuff in the world.” Then she goes on about things that were big for my head then, saying how some people own buildings, and that’s a bad way, and some people work banks, and that’s a bad way, and some people police, and that’s a bad way, and some people in the army, and that’s a bad way, and insurance, and taxing, and lawyering and all, she say it’s all bad ways.

I don’t know what she means, but she lights up a black cigarette and keeps going on and on, giving lots of examples, saying how most people make a living holding other ones down, but not the 84

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way she makes a living holding them down, but in a bad way so they can’t never get up and don’t get no pleasure from it. She says at least when she holds a man down, he gets up and he gets off and he go. Her long cigarette’s done by the time she get done talking and I’m full of chocolate and whiskey.

I go back in the room calmer then and start thinking about all the things she was saying. Some ole boys come in and the wall opens and closes a few times. They pulling and it’s fine again cause I got stuff to think about, about all the stuff in the world; about how she say there’s enough stuff for everybody to have everything, but they won’t let each other at it and it don’t make no sense in goodness. I’m thinking she’s probably right how it don’t make no sense. I’m thinking about the cornfields that were endless and the woods and all the stores full of things, everybody needing money to get them and the things that gets thrown out and payin for houses and all the empty places. It’s a lot to think about. It’s like the whole world was dancing some strange suffering dance in front of me.

Like I saw all the starving skeletons of all the world dancing a starving dance below fruitful trees. That makes me think of that old Bible story with Eve, where there’s the apple she wants to eat but she aint allowed to touch it. I think I’m about to be onto something big, but I guess it just wasn’t my night for being able to think, cause just then I notice something strange.

The ole boy who was pulling was leaning in and looking at me.

I guess that don’t sound so strange, but the way he’s looking at me is not like usual.

He looks to me familiar, like someone I met before but can’t place. He’s leaning in more but he stops pulling and covers himself.

Then he’s tapping on the window and saying something I can’t really hear. He’s shouting at me, and I can tell he’s saying, “Are you from . . . ?” But I can’t hear the end, so he takes his finger and writes in the gunk on the glass the name of my town. I nod yes, that’s where I’m from. Then he writes my mom’s name on the glass gunk and I almost fall over. He points at me, he mouths, “You Track Three: News of the World

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her daughter?” I nod yes, stunned, cause I aint heard her name in years. I guess I aint heard it now either, but even seeing my mom’s name scratched on the window gunk made me sentimental.

He gets this weird look on his face and sits back down and turns sideways. Not looking at me, he finish pulling against the side by the wall. He puts himself back in and points for me to go out and meet him around the side. i go out to the parking lot and he’s there burning a cigarette.

He sure does look then like someone I know. Looking at him there, I start to know who he looked like. He’s balding on top and he’s got hair hanging down back to his shoulders. He’s dressed like any ole boy in jeans, but his jeans are tight and he’s wearing a nice leather jacket and gold bracelet, and he’s rough looking, and I know who he look like. He looks like ole Mister Looney Tunes.

“Well goddamn!” he says, “I don’t believe it. You’re Panama’s daughter.”

I nod slow, yes. He just shakes his head at me like I’m a wonder of the world. “Goddamn girl!” he says. “My name’s Hank.” He reached out to shake my hand. “My older brother wanted to be yer daddy.”

I know who he means his old brother was: Mister Looney Tunes. Hank says that he was just a young one when that stuff happened. I say I was too. He says, well he weren’t a young one like I was a young one, and I guess he’s right, cause he’s probably around fifty, and I’m just sixteen. Still, I worried for a second he might be sore. He might be thinking how I killed his brother, but he just kept laughing and shaking his head at me.

He asks what I’m doing here. I tell him he seen what I’m doing here. He looked embarrassed then. But I say there aint nothing wrong with it, that there’s worse I could be doing. He says that’s right and laughs again. He says it sure is a shame what happened, my momma and his brother goin down the way they did. He says his brother was a crazy sonofabitch, and he’s real sorry for what

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happened. I think, then, he’s not even blaming me. Maybe he don’t know I was the one that done it. I don’t say anything about it one way or another. What’s there to say? He pats me on the shoulder and hoots. “Idn’t this something?” He says he’s got something for me. He says he’s got a present for me that his brother was gonna give to my mom after they got married like he wanted, but that aint ever happened cause of what happened. So he says it’s rightful that I come get it now. It’s rightfully mine and I should come get it.

I say, “What is it?”

Hank says it’s a surprise and I gotta go with him to his place to get it. His place, he says, is over the river. I get excited and ask if he’s under the arch. But he says no, that he’s two hours south of there, in the country. I get disappointed. But he tells me it don’t matter none, because when he gives me what I got coming, I can go wherever, whenever.

He’s staying the night around here and leaving in the morning.

I should meet him out front by his truck. I see his truck and he sees I get scared when I seen it cause it’s a big truck with a white wagon hooked to it. But he tells me not to worry, there’s nothing in it. He already made his delivery. I ask, is there tigers at his place? He says he don’t deal in no flesh-eating animals no more after what happened. So I say I’ll think about it, and he says I better just come with him, and I say I’ll think about it. Then I go back in to finish my work.

When I finish my work, the sun’s coming up, and I been thinking about it and I think I’ll just go with him, yeah, cause I can’t get out all the bad feelings Helen put in my head about what I been doing, no matter how much I think about the other bad things you can do in this world, and also I want my mom’s present, whatever it is. So I get my pay and decide not to tell the sweet woman and her old man goodbye, cause they might get mad. I just go get my bags and tell the motel manager I’m leaving. He gives me the money Helen paid for the rest of the week back, so I got lots of money then. I use the phone to call her and hope she don’t answer.

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She don’t. I leave a message telling her I’m going with my mom’s friend, but I still want to see her when she’s done driving around cause I’ll need her help finding a place in the city. i get my bag . I hadn’t slept none. I just stand there by his truck

for a while out front of the motel with the sun coming up. When the sun finish coming up, he come out of somewhere and he looked a little like hell. The tops of his hand’s all covered in ink and he smells bad, but he smiles real big when he see me. He says he’s sure glad I decided to come. He opens the door and I climb up in. He says not to be scared of him.

I guess he thinks I might be scared of him cause I’m a little girl and he’s a big old man who I don’t know. But what he don’t know is I keep a knife in my boot that got a sharp top and jagged edges on the bottom, so I aint usually scared.

The engine started up and he put on some old country music and starts crooning along. I feel real good, cause not too long and we crossing the bridge I been wanting to cross. The river is shining in the morning sun below me, then all the big city is coming up around me sparkling silver. The signs are so big. Some of them are like big TVs in the sky that move and blink, and we goin through it all. I aint never seen anything like it. He was laughing at me, saying I was a real live country girl and wasn’t the city something? I was ohhing and ahhing and saying yeah, it was. But it seems no sooner than we in it, we out of it, then we’re just driving down the highway through the country. I was all sleepy, so I just conked out then.

Hours later, I woke up, but I’m not in the truck anymore. I’m layin on a bed. It’s a nice house that I’m in, some old ranch cowboy house with lots of decorations and animals on the walls and wood and leather furniture and all. There’s a big silver eagle statue with its wings spread out real wide, staring at me. There’s a deer head looking shocked in the corner. He got a real big flag on one wall from some other country I don’t know, look like some red broken ship wheel spinning, or maybe like a broken cross. I get up and 88

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walk around. On the shelves, I see he’s got some photos of him and his brother, Mister Looney Tunes, both when they were grown and kids. I see a picture in old weird colors of what I guess was his mom. She sure was pretty. He got, too, some old pictures in frames, in black and white, of some kind of army men lined up, holding their hands way up high, arms straight in the air, looking real serious. Those men in the pictures have the same flag on their arms as the ones that’s on the wall. I see, too, that that eagle there got that broken cross thing in its talons. That thing’s everywhere. On the table there’s a bowl of mints. I took one.

Hank’s in the kitchen making a sandwich. He makes one for me too. We sit down and eat. He says he’s gonna show me my present in a minute after we eat, then he starts yakkin about my momma which makes me more sad than it does anything else. He talks about how she was a smart one and her paintings he remembers.

He tells me how she was always talking about being part Indian, but he always thought of her as a good old American country girl, though strange, and she seemed pretty fair to him, and even if her great-grandma was really Indian, he say he don’t see any Injin in me, that I sure don’t look like one. But I guess that just makes me more of a real American if it’s true, he say. He say he was surprised the tiger got my mom, cause she seemed crazy and tough enough maybe to fight even a tiger off. And if she wasn’t tough enough, he says, she was pretty enough to tame a tiger, like me. He says I got her beauty. Then we done eating.

He tells me I need to be wearing pants to get my surprise. I don’t got none, I just got this one dress I was wearing and a few other skirts, so he gives me a pair from his old old lady and one of her shirts too he says I can keep cause she done flew. he opens the door and we’re standing on the porch looking at all his land. There sure is a hell of a lot of it, with barns and things and fences. He breeds albino animals like his brother done.

He says he got white buffalo out there that he breed. He got albino

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wallabies, albino kangaroos, and albino ferrets too. He points to a place with some little cages and fences. I see a white kangaroo in the distance hopping around there.

He walks me out to the biggest barn, a big red one. We go through the doors out the back where we’re standing in a big field that just seems to go on and on. Hank grabs a rope and starts ringing a dinner bell. that was the first time I saw her. It was afternoon there in southern Missouri. The sun was right smack dab left of the middle of the sky and all the grass was shining green and it all smelled sweet there where the trees was just blowing in the breeze. I didn’t have nowhere to go then and no way to go nowhere and there that dinner bell gonging and then I feel the ground thumping like it’s thumping in my feet and my heart starts thumping. Then she come.

She come up over that hill like something I aint ever seen. My blood’s rushing and I feel like I got a home again for the first time in ever. She’s a beauty and she’s a horse is what she is, a pure white horse running, just galloping up over that hill. When she gets up closer, I see her eyes are blood red, like two bulbs of blood bursting out the side. I know then this aint just no white horse, this is a real albino horse like he say, pure. And she’s all mine and she must know she’s all mine cause she just comes right up, just starts walking then when she gets up and comes right on up to me and start smelling me, I’m blowing in her nose like my mom told me to do so a horse will know you. She’s blowing back and nuzzling my hair and all.

Hank started laughing over there, looking at me like I’m a world wonder again, saying, isn’t that something? He says it sure is something, that she sure is my horse. And she sure is. She’s two years old then, the baby of the one that was supposed to go to my mom.

She’s a young one then. He tells me we gotta start riding lessons, that I should probably get it in a few days anyway, cause I’m a

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country girl. I guess that’s right, cause my mom rode me on horses with her sometimes those few years I had her after she got out of jail before she went on to the other side, we rode sometimes, with her holding me in front of her like that.

I ask what my horse’s name is. Hank says he’s been calling her Aryanrhod which is an old highfalutin name that means white wheel which is also a name for a moon goddess, and I like that just fine. He says for short he calls her Aryan. I like the sound of that.

She’s got a name you can pronounce easy, right out loud, not like me.

Hank goes and gets a saddle right away and we start right then that day and I didn’t get off of her till way after the sundown. That was then about the happiest day of my life.

We spent six days just doin nothing but me learning to ride and eating ham sandwiches. I call Helen, but she’s not answering. I’m leaving messages with the number so she can come get me soon.

But I’m not anxious to leave right then, until that sixth night. Then I got to go, cause that last night Hank had to go and act a fool.

That weren’t no way to do nothing the way he did. it ’ s late . i ’ m laying in the bed about to go to sleep there and the door creaks open. There Hank come, not even saying hi or nothing, just come right in and get on in bed with me. All of a sudden he’s on top of me slobbering on me, grabbing at me and starting to undo his self like he’s just gonna go and take it. He’s sucking, nuzzling at my neck and petting my hair. I remember the first time someone touch me like that, a few weeks ago, it was Helen, and it made me feel like I had an animal in me that wanted to be tearing without killing. When he’s doing it though, it makes me feel like animals too, but more like insects, like my body is all made of spiders eating each other. I tell him, “Hey now, what you doing?” He says I know what he’s doing. I say I don’t like it and he gotta stop now, he gotta get off of me now. He says, “Aw come on,” like he a kid askin to go to the carnival on a school night. I say, “Get

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off me,” and he just says I don’t mean it, then he pull up my skirt and I sure am glad I sleep with my boots on. So I just play along for a second then when I see he aint stopping no matter what I say and I wiggle like I’m going along, but I really wiggling to get the knife outta my boot.

Then there was another red moment in my life, cause I’m cutting him, but I don’t want to see no more death, so I’m just cutting his arm open and his face is twisting and he’s howling and jumping off me and holding his bleeding arm. His mustache is twisting and his bald head turning red. I still got the knife. I’m sitting on the bed growling at him, slashing with my knife. He tells me that I’m a crazy bitch, but I just keep growling and slashing in the air with the knife. Hank looks awful scared then. The blood is going everywhere. He runs out the door and shuts it and I hear something click. I guess he locked me in there, but I also guess he’s dumb cause he knows I’m good with locks and anyway, there’s a window and we on the ground floor and there’s a phone in there too.

I pick up the phone and call Helen over and over till she finally answers and I tell her everything that happened. She sounds real mad. She says she’s five hours away, but she’ll be there to get me.

I tell her to come with her truck cause we gotta take Aryan. It’s eleven then so I gotta wait there almost all night. I can hear Hank outside howling and moaning sometimes and rummaging around.

But he didn’t try to come back in. No he did not.

I’m not sure how time passed after that cause I was real upset with the blood everywhere and all. I just sat there thinking I was a tiger, then sometimes I stop thinking that and try to sing myself my songs. It passed quick that way. I guess Hank was sleeping by then when I saw the lights in the drive. Helen made good time. It was just about four in the morning, still dark out. I gather my things, open the window and creep out.

Helen comes running up and grabs me and hugs me and looks like she might kill someone or cry, and she says, “Where is the motherfucker?” I say I already cut him good, let’s just get my horse 92

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and get. So she opened the diesel truck wagon and I go along and get Aryan. I’m pulling her along down the drive and there Hank comes out the front door. He gots his arm all wrapped neat like maybe he even went somewhere and got it done right. It’s wrapped good enough he don’t even seem to be having no problem carrying that shotgun he got there, and I think I shoulda cut him better.

He’s coming down the porch carrying that shotgun, hollering for us to stop right there, but he don’t know Helen, and I guess neither did I, cause she’s standing by the open door of the diesel truck one minute and she just turns around for a second and turns back, then she’s got a shotgun too. Hers got part of it sawed off though.

She points it right at him and starts screaming like Rambo in Russian. Hank looks surprised and he stops there when she’s pointing it right at him, so he point his right at me. Then there we all were.

I was getting ready to start feeling nervous and wondering what was going to happen and feeling like I’m in an old time movie, but I didn’t have time cause, like I said, Helen’s going crazy like Rambo, and I guess he shouldnta pointed that gun at me, cause she just starts right off shooting when he lift that gun and point it at me, she just shoots right in front of him and hollering like a banshee in Russian, and all the gravel flies up around him, and Aryan is screaming and jumping and I’m holding her rope and Hank’s dancing with his feet and howling. She cocks the gun and shoots again, then again. That old boy just done and gone ahead and dropped his gun while he’s dancing. Then he’s standing there with his hands in the air and the dust is settling. We’re all staring at each other and Helen walks up and has the gun up close to him, up by his head. She says, “Put that thing in there and let’s go.” I put my horse in the back of the diesel trailer then and pat her calm. I come back out and Hank is trying to talk to me while Helen’s holding the gun on him. He tells me this aint no way to treat someone who gave me a gift. He tells me he wants the horse back and I’m stealing and he’s gonna call the cops and I got no right.

Then I walk right up to him, and I say something real good.

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Don’t know how the words came into my head, but sometimes after I go through something they come good like that. Maybe it was from all my time of philosophy thinking. I don’t know, but anyway I say this: “Hank, there’s things in this world that’s yours and things that aint. There’s things you gotta take no matter what cause they yours whether they given to you or not. Then there’s things that can be got both by taking or by being given. Then there are some things that you can only get if they given to you, some things that even if you take them, they still aint yours if they aint given.

What you tried to take from me was that last kind. It can only be got by being given and I wasn’t giving and you didn’t even ask.

How bout that? This horse here, that’s the first kinda thing. She’s mine no matter what. And anyway, you already gave her to me.”

Helen made me pick up his gun and unload it there. We got into that truck and drove off. He was shouting at us when we were leaving, but I know he knew he done wrong and he weren’t gonna try to do nothing more with us. after driving two hours , we were where I been wanting to be all this time. It looks nice in the morning sun, all sparkling.

There’s more cars going in there than I ever seen in all my life.

Helen says all those cars are going to work. It looks like some kind of ballet with machines the way the roads were all bridges all piled atop each other, curving in and out and around, circling that city.

I say it’s beautiful. Helen laughs at me while we riding fast up high in her truck, so I can see it all. “Well, here you go,” she says. She says that I’m gonna live here now. She’s got friends in this city that I can live with for free, in the north of this city. They got a big house there right outside the city part, and a yard and all where I can keep Aryan. She says they urban farmers. That’s the words she use, I remember cause I made her repeat it and explain it; urban farmers.

Later, after I meet them and they say it a lot too, and they explain it a lot while I’m living with them. They keep explaining it even when I wasn’t askin about it no more; urban farming.

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We get there and park outside of this house that’s kinda out of the way up on a hill. It looks real old, like it been falling apart and someone been patching it back together. It even really does look like a patchwork quilt the way it’s all different colors in different places, like people been painting at different times in different ways with different buckets of paint. There’s plants growing like a jungle all up the front walk and bursting out from the porch like monsters.

Helen tells me this is the Catholic Worker’s house and I get nervous and think she’s gonna have me living with nuns, but those people didn’t look like no Catholics I ever seen and they didn’t seem to be working much either, or not in the way I thought of work.

The first one I met was Christie. Christie was real skinny and she got short brown hair, and everything she wore was either brown or forest green, and I guess maybe she seemed Catholic. She come out and stand on the porch with a big smile and shook my hand and made me feel real welcome. She helped me get Aryan out of the truck. We take her to the back and put her in the kind of barn garage thing back there. It’s a big yard, but I worry it’s not big enough for a horse, but it’ll have to do for now.

Christie is all excited about having a horse. I guess it makes her feel more like a real urban farmer. She fed Aryan an apple and gave her some grass and water. She had some straw there ready.

We spent some time before I even went in just combing her and all. I thought Christie was about the sweetest lady in the world the way she’s talking to me and telling me how I can stay there as long as I need in my own room, and that they have clothes in there I can have. Helen’s inside eating breakfast then and Christie tells me it’s time to go get settled, so I get my bag and go.

The house is big and wooden. Even inside, the walls are all different colors, with plants and books and old weird things hung around, like dolls and balls and heads and teeth. There are five people total who live in that big house, and me will make six. I meet some of them. They’re all nice, like Christie, two skinny guys in dirty neon shorts who talk like girls do. One of them was Track Three: News of the World

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juggling things and shook my hand in between juggles. There’s another lady who looks like Christie’s twin but not as pretty. Christie kiss her on the cheek and tells me her name is Chris, Christie and Chris. I guess they an item. I think that’s funny. They all say good morning and ask my name. When I say it, they all look weird at me and don’t even try to pronounce it. Then I go into the kitchen for breakfast and there Helen is, big like a Roman emperor, eating bacon and toast at the table. She nods at me. I’m looking around and then, oh well, then that’s something.

Then my heart stops and all the blood rush to my face. That’s the first time I seen her, sitting there next to Helen. I guess I should feel bad about it, cause Helen seen the way I seeing her, but I can’t help but be seeing her that way.

That’s the first time I saw Jules. She was sitting there in a dirty old stretched white tank top, but that looked real good on her and showed her muscles and all. She didn’t have no bra on and I saw her little brown nipples poking through the thin fabric, cause she was wearing that shirt like she was some tough guy. She was just sitting at the table holding her head, look like she was dying or praying over her cup of coffee and toast she was crunching. She must have had a big night before, I guess, but I didn’t know then what was the matter with her. I just stopped in the doorway and stared at her and everything in me got really happy all of a sudden, real excited like a kid who saw a new present on the shelf, and scared too, scared suddenly. Even before she turned to look at me, I was scared she might not like me.

Christie came in and announced that I was the new person who was gonna be staying with them a while and said, “This is Jules,” then asked my name again. I said it. That’s the first time Jules looked at me. She got a paranoid look on her face when she heard my name; she turned her head and looked me up and down real good.

I was looking at her real good too. She had the sides of her hair shaved with it all just in the middle, but the middle part was long 96

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and hung to one side like a horse mane. Her skin was light brown, gold-cinnamon, I thought, and her eyes were dark, and she had a piercing like a bull through the middle of her nose, one on her eye, and another ring in her lip. When she was looking at me then, she was looking at me like she didn’t like me at all, not at all really.

But I was a kid then and looked like one still, real country, skinny with long strawberry hair hanging down, holding my bag with both hands, real innocent like that book my grandma used to read to me, like Anne of Green Gables–looking. I thought something then when she was looking at me bad like that. I thought maybe she didn’t like me at first then cause she was a Catholic and I looked like a Protestant to her. I was looking at her like she was Christmas morning, and she was looking at me like I was something she was gonna have to be dealing with, and Jules didn’t notice, but then Helen was looking at Jules like she was something she was gonna have to be dealing with. Then Jules grunted hi at me, and Christie sat me down and asked if I ate meat. I thought that was a funny question. She gave me some bacon and eggs. I started eating and we started talking about the horse and stuff while Jules was praying or dying over her breakfast.

That wasn’t really the best start, cause I didn’t know then what I know now. I started talking about Aryan, and I thought then she had a better name than me, a name you can say right out loud without problems. But I see now, nothing’s ever simple with me.

When I said her name, Helen grimaced and Christie looked confused, and Jules, well, Jules woke right up. She asked, “What’re you talking about?”

And I’m happy she’s talking to me, so I say “I’m talking bout my horse, Aryan.” I tell her I can take her for a ride on Aryan sometime if she wants.

Jules looks like a bad question at Christie, and Christie says, “What did you say about Aryans?”

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Hank told me how Aryanrhod means white goddess of the moon and all, but then Christie was giving me this look that was like laughing and screaming at the same time and leaning back looking surprised, and Jules had her eyes raised too and was looking real mad at me.

Then I found out what else her name means. I guess that makes sense when I think about the type of person Hank probably is. He was talking some weird things about Injins. He probably didn’t just mean moon goddess with Aryan, and he probably get something else, I see now, outta breeding pure white things. I didn’t know so much about that stuff then and how people feel all sorts of ways bout that stuff and all that history, but they gave me a real long lesson right then at that table. But Jules didn’t. Jules just cussed some things under her breath and downed her coffee shaking like trembling mad. That moment I still wasn’t so clear why, but I see now what kinda person she thought I was, and she near broke my heart then. She cleaned her dishes ranting in cusses and clinked them hard and left the room.

They’re all quiet while she’s doing this, but after she leaves, Helen and Christie teach me real good all kinds of history I never learn while I was in the white place or at church, but I guess I know a little about it from some movies. There was all kinds and colors of people in the white place, but we never talk about this stuff or think about it cause we were all tied up and singing to ourselves.

But Christie and Helen telling me all this stuff about history, and it keeps going on, and I’m wishing they would stop cause it’s making my head hurts and I haven’t slept a wink. I’m real tired.

Just rocking in my chair at the table while they lecture me and my head’s throbbing. I’m thinking I can’t do anything about it anyway. I’m thinking, Aryan knows her name now, that’s what she answers to. She comes when she’s called, and none of this stuff makes no difference to her. She’s a goddamned horse. Goddamned horses don’t give a good goddamn about history and all that. Christie can see I really don’t know none of this stuff they 98

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teaching me, and while we’re talking, she’s looking at me like I’m a world wonder.

Finally they stop and let me go to bed. Helen follows me and we go lay down in my new room, which is empty except for the bed and drawers and some weird pictures of monsters painted on the walls, which are all different colors of green. She lay down by me and turn over, looking at me all doe-eyed, then told me again how she sure does love me. She starts going on about the future and all like she done before. She says she knows I need some time for growing, and I can do that good here. But, she says, when that’s up, she’s betting on me for her. She looked real serious when she say this. Something about that look in her eye scares me. She says she’s got money saved. She’s thinking of buying a place in a couple years, when I’m ready. She don’t say this like she mean if I’m ready in a couple years, she’s telling me like when, like I’ll for sure be ready in a couple years.

I get mad at her then deep inside me and don’t know how to show it right, so I just say then, I say, “Well I guess that’s right you wanting to adopt me, cause I know you’re old enough to be my momma.”

Really I had enough of talking to anyone at all and them telling me how to do what and why. I needed my damn sleep already.

Helen gets all ruffled. She starts fidgeting and looking mad like she don’t know what to say. I’m not looking at her but staring angry at the ceiling. Then she says, aint she done a lot for me? Like I owe her something. I can’t but nod yes, cause it’s true, but still. Then she ask, won’t I be wanting a house of my own and all? I say that I don’t want to be no place Aryan can’t stay. That’s when Helen tells me, laying there in that bed, real rough, she tells me it’s time for me and Aryan to get new names. She says I need a new name cause no one can pronounce the one I got and it makes me seem crazy.

She tells me my new name is Mya, which means mine in Russian.

I don’t know how I feel about Helen naming me mine, which really means hers, but I’m too tired to argue. I like the sound of Mya. It’s in my name, anyway.

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Then she tells me just to call the horse Ryan from now on, and I say, “Oh fucking hell,” and I go on to sleep.

When I wake up, Helen’s gone. She left a note with her phone number and she says she’ll have a four-day break in a couple of weeks, she’ll be back to visit with me then. She says to call her sometimes while she’s gone.

So I’m just laying there for a while, looking at the ceiling and thinking how this is my first place of my own. I feel good and proud about having it and having some money saved on top. But I’m feeling guilty too about all the stuff they telling me before, guilty for I don’t know what, cause it wasn’t my doing, but guilty about Aryan’s name, and somehow guilty too about all the history they told me, like it was me who done all that history. I still can’t figure why I was feeling guilty like that, cause I was just a young one, and I didn’t do that history. But it felt like to me then like I was responsible for it all, I mean for the whole shebang of all of it. I guess they making me feel, when they talk to me, like it was all my idea in the first place. They make me feel, when they giving me that history lesson even though we all three the same color, they make me feel somehow like it was all something I did, maybe something I did and then got amnesia about, so they have to tell me again what I done did.

I start telling myself then, I never done nothing and to stop thinking about it. But then I start wondering, if I was then, I start wondering, if I was living inside that history then, if I was living inside history, I start wondering what I would have done then. If I would have done all those things they tell me about. Cause I’m wearing the uniform on my bones of the ones who done it. So maybe, inside history in that uniform, I think then maybe I would have. I start wondering and trying to find then if I have something different inside me that would have made me not part of that bad history. But maybe I would have just got caught up in it.

All the history they told me about seemed to be about people in different uniforms staying with each other and doin what those 100

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do. I wonder if I would have done the same. I start thinking about who I would have been in history, but I can’t find myself nowhere there. Then it hits me that this now will someday be history and I wonder who I will be in this history then, later. But I can’t see me in the history of the future or of the past. I can’t see me in no uniform ever, in no picture in no book, with captions talking about what I done or where I been.

I don’t see that. Except there was one picture with one caption when I was little, in a newsprint article, a black and white photo of me being carried away by a police, I remember. I weren’t meant to see it, but I seen it in my grandma’s house. She had it hidden in a drawer, a paper from the day of the red moment when I weren’t talking but just screaming sometimes. I saw there on the cover of that paper me lookin weird and the cop carrying me away. The headline said, “Survivor,” and the caption beside it said, “Girl Feeds Family to Tiger.”

I don’t know what kinda thing that would be for the history books though. I don’t know what kinda lesson that is. I wonder what people will be thinking about me when they see that picture later and it’s history. Not the kinda history they teach in schools.

When I was just sixteen then, laying in that bed, I had a thought that’s cheesy. But still, I think it’s got something. I start thinking about what’s inside us all, cause I seen what lots don’t get to see.

I saw what’s inside everyone. It’s the same stuff. It’s just red and it’s nothing, and it just runs out. You can’t believe how very much nothing we are. We just meat and red running. We think we something, but we’re nothing. We think we’re something, then nature come in and show us what we are. We aint nothing. The color of nothing is red.

We’re all trying to be something, I know. And I think that’s what all those people in history was doing. Cause I seen how scary nothing is. It was hard to see how nothing my momma was, cause she was everything to me, and when I saw the big red meat nothing of her, I seen then how everything’s one big nothing. It’s scary to know Track Three: News of the World

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how nothing you are. But I think we all know it. So those history people were just trying to keep away from the horrible fact that they nothing by makin themselves something certain on the outside. But then they gotta look at the truth some way too, right in the face.

Maybe that even made it more true for them then that they something certain, seeing how nothing other people were, ripping them open and looking at the insides of others was easier than looking at their own red nothing meat. But everybody gotta look at it someway. That’s how they did it. And I guess lots still doing it that way.

This is the big thought I’m having when I hear someone thumping on my door. I get up and open it slow, cause I don’t want to talk to no one right then. It’s Jules standing there. She’s got a fist balled and she’s smacking her hand with it. I think she’s gonna pound me, and I don’t want to be tumbling with her, well, not that way. I can’t get away from violence no matter where I go and right then something in me feels real defeated about that. I think maybe this time I’ll just take a beating, cause I got no fight left in me that I know of right then. I close my eyes and stand against the wall in the hall, thinking I’m just gonna let her pound me and maybe that’ll be the end of it. I wait, but I don’t feel no pounding. I open my eyes, and she’s just standing there, still looking at me like I’m something she has to be dealing with, but not punching her hand anymore. She says, real serious, “I need to have a talk with you.” I tell her she can come in my room, but she says she wants to talk in the hall. She said something then about something being transparent. I thought that was weird and still don’t know quite what she means, but others there said that kinda thing later too. They all talk weird like that there.

So I say, “All right, let’s talk here then.” And Jules says we got to be living together now so she got to know this is still a safe space and she needs to get some things out in the open. She asks me if I have a problem with her. I say I got no beef with her.

She tells me her family is from India and do I have a problem with that? I say, “I don’t have no problem with that.”

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It’s hard talking this way with her, cause she don’t know I fall a little in love with her when I first seen her and now more. Even when she’s looking at me like she wants to kill me, there’s something really nice about the way her voice was all hard and serious and her eyes were all wet and her muscles all tensed. It’s hard, cause I’m worried I’ll give the wrong answers and I’m nervous anyway, cause just lookin at her made me feel shaky. I keep trying not to look at her chest where her nipples are showing from under the thin white tank she still got on. On top of all that, I can tell she’s smarter than me, cause after we get through the basics, she started asking me real complicated questions I don’t know how to answer about history and philosophy thinking. They seem like trick questions, to tell you the truth. So I just try to keep my answers short, down to yes or no. She seems satisfied with my answers then, though, that night, and leave me alone. But she avoid me like the plague after that. For months she steer clear of me like I got something contagious. those first six months I live there, they just pass like clockwork. Christie show me some gardening and I do that every day, and those boys show me some juggling and I catch right on. I was doing that every day too. Getting real good. They all got a theater they run together and do little shows every week, so they trying then to find something I can do to be in the show. Christie adopted me like her baby and always asking me if I’m all right and makin sure I eat and all. She show me the box they keep of free clothes.

The box said free, and they put clothes in there they don’t want.

I can have them if I want them. There are some weird things in there. I take a few. They got some sparkly shirts, like theater clothes, some regular old sweaters, and a black tutu that fits me just fine. I take that and wear it a lot.

Christie and me take Aryan to an abandoned place where a bunch of factories used to be and now is all open land grown over and broken buildings. We ride Aryan there a few times a week. I’m

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getting real good at that too. Just spend hours sometimes learning to ride her all different ways, ways even a horse aint meant to be ridden.

Helen comes back every now and then to make it with me and takes me out to dinners. She takes me out for one birthday that pass. I don’t even tell anyone when I turn seventeen. When I go out with Helen, those are the only times I really go to the city, or go out at all, except for riding Aryan. I guess I still got some of the country living in me then, cause I don’t think about going out on my own, even though something in me wanted to see that sparkling city. I go to the theater they run with all them once, but it just made me nervous, all those people all over, so I only went the once, at first.

That country living is hard in me, is like a big open spot in me I’m trying to fill up. I’m trying not to think about missing my grandma and dad, and can’t believe I’m missing them then, even the way we were, which was like a weird dream. I’m trying to fill up my missing them with Helen and with Christie and with not thinking. But it’s good there. There’s no violence there to get in and turn me to growling. Nothing strong and mean happening to me for months and months. That was a time in my life when some things trying to be settling in me. It’s still in me though, I know, cause I wake up screaming and growling still sometimes from my sleep. And one time, one of those skinny boys come up behind me like a joke to surprise me. He poke my sides from behind and says, “Boo.” When he did that, I turned and hissed and swing hard at him, but he ducked real quick. Good for him. but still , even with that violence inside me, it were a good

place for me to be for a while there with those queer Catholics.

They was all gentle as kittens, so I just lay my head down there and let all the blood in me cool. I didn’t even worry too much then over all the talk Helen was doing about the future. I didn’t even worry too much then even about the love growing in my heart for that girl who wouldn’t look at me, or Aryan’s name and all that bad history.

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For a while I didn’t worry about my own place in history. I just let that house with all its plants growing outside swallow me up like a cocoon, not even knowing I’d be coming out of it any different.

Not even knowing that time is history, like women, like love, and it all come getcha, even if you don’t move an inch, it gonna come getcha, make you show it what you’re worth. It’s gonna change your value.

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track four

Bleeding Heart Blues

like i said , those first six months with those queer Catholics passed like clockwork, mostly unthinking. But I guess I was learning things then I didn’t even know I was learning. It was near the end of fall, getting close to being really winter, and all the people in the house say they’re going to a gathering. They taking me too, cause they say I need to start getting out and socializing. It’s down South where it’s warmer and lots of people from all over the country are getting together there, camping out in a field in the woods there for days and doing their things. One of the skinny boys has an uncle who is a farmer, so he gets a wagon we take Aryan in.

They want me to take her, cause they say she’ll be popular there, so I take her and we go on down.

That was something else then to see. There were hundreds of people all looking strange to me then, some with tattoos on their faces and their hair all weird ways. One man had a blue beard tattooed on his chin. Another guy had clown paint tattooed permanent on his cheeks and nose. He was with a traveling circus, he said, but it didn’t look like any circus I ever seen. Just four beat-up old cars painted psychedelic, full of people with tattoos who ate glass and walked on knives and all. They put on a big show for us the first night. I liked that one. The guy hammering the nail into his skull and the girl crunching light bulbs in her teeth, the clown dancing on the ladder made of polka-dotted machetes.

It made me think these people knew what they were made of.

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Made me happy they weren’t afraid to feel around in the meat of themselves.

Christie and I been working on a show too we gonna put on the third night, with old bluesy music and her dancing while I juggle on Aryan. After I see how good these others are, I know I gotta get some practicing done before we put on. the second night I was fitting to practice just after it had got

dark. There was no one show going on, and people doing their things in different parts, cooking and singing and flipping and practicing their things all over, milling around chatting. So I take Aryan out and walk her around slow. Everyone’s looking at me then. Some didn’t see her when I take her out to walk the night before, so some start following behind me talking about her red eyes and how white she is and all. I go make my place by the trees and some of them follow me. It made me nervous, cause I just wanted to practice my things I been trying, too. But I guess I can practice with an audience.

I get out my balls and stand on top of Aryan, on her back like I’ve been learning to do, and start juggling them like that. I’m pretty good since I been doing it every day. I can juggle them balls all kinds of ways, in different patterns and behind my back and through my legs. The people watching start making ooh and aah noises when I doing that and sometimes even clapping, so the crowd is getting bigger.

I stop and look out into that night field, into that crowd around me. And Jules is standing there at the front looking at me like I don’t know what. It makes me nervous, cause in the six months I’ve been there, she hasn’t looked at me once or said one word even edgewise, and now she’s looking at me hard. She’s got a sack on her back. She pushes on up then through the crowd and come and stand near me, a few yards away. She unzips her bag and takes out three sticks. She stands there looking all confident and indifferent, the way that made me crazy about her. Then she starts tossing the Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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weird sticks up and starts juggling casual and slow. After watching her for a few minutes, I start juggling again too, still on the back of Aryan there. I don’t think, I just feel that this is nice that we doing something together finally and I try not to think about why now.

Then all of a sudden there’s a bright burst of flame from the side and a burning flaring sound, and I drop my balls, one two three four. Aryan starts to stomp and I got to hop down off her and grab her bit.

I look over, and it’s Jules where the fire is. She done lit those three sticks on fire and she’s juggling them. They torches, I see now. She’s doing some crazy shit then. In between juggling, she stops and puts the fire in her mouth and blows it out. Fire’s coming out of her mouth like a dragon. She’s billowing fire up toward the night sky from her lips like she’s a volcano and tossing it all around herself.

That was too much for me then, that sight of her. That was it for me. I loved her so hard then and I wanted her to love me so bad then I probably would’ve done anything for it. That moment right then I felt like I was made of glass and she was reshaping me with the fire.

She grabs three more torches from her bag. They’re not on fire, and she starts juggling then, six sticks, three burning, three not.

I’m just looking at her and thinking she doesn’t see me anymore, thinking she’s never gonna see me, thinking she just wanted people to stop looking at me and my Aryan, and look at her instead, and that’s all she was doing. But then she turns to me and nods and tosses the sticks that aren’t burning at me, one two three. Here they come twirling at me in the night sky, like a dare. I catch em and I know what she wants, she wants me to juggle them, so I do. I start juggling those three unlit torches and she’s facing me now juggling her three lit torches. She walking closer to me, watching me best she can and she juggling and I am too. Her eyes are fiery and I’m doing all right, not dropping them or anything and always grabbing them by the right end, the end that don’t get lit. I’m shaking, 108

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cause I know what’s gonna happen next, after a few minutes of me juggling these good, I already know what’s coming.

But I have this feeling that what’s coming next will be something more than what it is. I’m thinking what’s coming next is a test, is fire. I’m thinking what’s coming next is the real dare, is a threat, is love. And all that aint what I expected love to be, but I see then clear as the fire in her eyes that that’s just what love is and how could I have ever expected it to be anything else?

Everyone’s standing real close now in a half circle and tensed up. More people keep coming, filling up the crowd, quiet and cold in their breath while they looking at us, seeming to sense something else happening bigger than a juggling show. Even Aryan standing behind me seems tense and watching. Then it happens. Jules gives me a nod and tosses one of those flaming sticks up high, coming right at me. I toss one of mine back at her, and almost at the same time, we catch em. She sets my torch on fire then with the other ones while she’s juggling and we change two more times that way until all the sticks are lit and now we’re both juggling fire. We’re both juggling three lit torches.

At first it weren’t about her anymore. It’s about motion, the perpetual motion and keeping up and avoiding. That was the best feeling. It feel like I was all surrounded in heat. It feel like that heat was burning all the blood off. It feel like that heat was cleaning me, burning the blood off my hands and from my skin from all around, like I was bathing myself in the fire, burning all the bad away and I was in control of it. It was the cleanest moment.

I got the hang of it real quick and it was going smooth. People were clapping and some cheering. Then I’m looking at Jules while we’re juggling, and seeing her eyes through our leaping fountain of fire, then there was something in her eyes that I didn’t trust then, there was too much of a challenging look in them. While I’m juggling, she takes a lit torch and tosses it up high at me, so I act quick and toss one of mine up at her then so we change like that and we still each got only three. Everybody cheer, but I’m new at Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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this, and with the look in her eyes, I’m wondering if she wants me to be doing something with her or if she’s trying to kill me, really I wonder then if she aint maybe trying to kill me, whether she knows it or not, I can’t tell.

And then I get my answer, she go on and toss it back at me again, one, and then while that one’s in the air, two. She toss two of her sticks right at me and then she take a knee and starts blowing fire again, so I got no choice but to take them and keep em. I can’t toss em back.

Then I’m juggling five lit torches, by God if I aint. I’m thinking, I’m good at juggling, I’m practiced at it, but not this good and not with fire. I get em going though, and people are clapping and start chanting and keeping a beat. I’m feeling cocky then after a few seconds of doing it, I’m just smiling big and going. Then I hear some people screaming and the heat around me feels real close like the fire’s not just burning off some spiritual stuff, but like maybe something else is being burned off, too. That’s when I drop em, all five at once, I just drop em on the ground, but the flames still there above me, behind me. My hair’s done caught full on fire, so I start screaming and take off running. I’m a running streaking sound in the night again and my head aint just red hair no more, it really is a head of fire like they was always saying, and all that red hair that made me look real country hanging all down my back is a blazing trail behind me.

They all running behind then, a lot of people from the crowd run behind me and tackle me down. They start patting out my head with whatever they got. I’m face down in the ground and I’m hearing Aryan crying and stomping around, and some of these weird folks were patting down my head hard till steam was rising from me.

They let me turn around and I’m laying there on my back looking at the stars in the sky and tears running down my face. I feel it coming up in me. I start growling. I feel that burned pain on the back of my neck and on my head and I’m seeing through tiger eyes. Through tiger eyes everything looks closer. The stars look like 110

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things I could just swipe right outta the sky and swallow. All the people standing there over me look real close too; I can see all the way close under their skin where their blood pushing in their veins and I can smell them all, each one of them. I jump up on my fours growling and swiping at them, and they backing away, all those weirdos looking at me like I’m the weirdest one, scared of me and not sure what to do no more, and I don’t know why, but all those people that helped me, I don’t even see them like that then that moment, I just see them as things I want to be tearing into. Cause sometimes, I go on and be a tiger.

I’m on my fours then growling and swiping with my claws and they backing away and here Jules come running up to me. I remember then, I still see her, not like the others. I still see who she is. She aint just blood pulsing, but I’m mad as hell at her though.

She come running up talking about am I okay? I just growl and swipe real hard and try to bite at her. She looks like a circus lion tamer then with me, she’s batting at me and stepping forward then backing away, and I’m growling loud. That rumbling come up from inside me and don’t sound like no human thing. I’m growling loud at her, and her face falls flat then and all the blood drains out of it. She’s patting me back, but she looks scared of me then, that tough guy that she was with her Mohawk and muscles and all, she looks real scared of me then, like she aint really been dealing with no wild thing like me before. But she’s brave though. She comes forward again and tells me to calm down, holding her hands out in front of her, and everyone around us is just standing real still.

She says, “Calm down, calm down,” and I just jump then, I leap at her, but she’s brave and she come right back at me and we meet in the air, then we’re tumbling on the ground. We’re tumbling and I’m getting some bites in. I’m on top of her and she’s pushing and wrestling hard. But then something happens. I feel her body on me and I smell her smells, and I might be mad as hell, but something in me then, when it smell her, it’s already been defeated, so it just roll on over and play dead.

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She’s on top of me finally, holding me down, and I feel like all the fight’s out of me, so I’m just laying there, feeling her holding me down hard as she can, but I’m not even trying no more. Suddenly I’m just crying. Tears coming down my face and my body’s shakin. Jules seen this then. Then she’s sitting on me holding my burnt head in her arms and she’s rocking me against her and I’m crying and letting it all out. most the crowd goes away then cause this moment’s getting private. Christie though done come over talking about what the hell happened, and looking mad at Jules. Jules tells her what the hell happened while I’m sitting on the ground holding my knees looking up.

Christie comes over to me, but I feel a rumbling inside me and growl without looking up. Christie says to Jules to fix me and she takes Aryan away. I bet she needed a lot of calming down too.

I’m quiet. I’m not saying anything. Jules says to come on to her tent. I just follow her along, all the way through the field back to her tent.

She’s quiet too, but she’s always quiet. She sits me down in her tent. She’s looking all shameful about what happened and looking sorrowful at my hair. She says, “Well, some of this can be saved.

Can I do something with it?”

I say, “I don’t give a good goddamn what you do to it now. You already done it, so go on and finish it.” She just stands there when I say that like a kid being punished who knows they done wrong, but can’t find the words to say sorry. Then she gets into her bag and pulls out a knife. My hair’s all burnt up to just by my head when it was all down my back before, all that’s gone and the part all just to up above my neck is all fried and awful and I got burns on the back of my neck. It’s no good.

Jules gives me some lotion to put on my skin, and takes her knife and starts hacking away at my hair. She hacks away a while until my hair aint like it was no more, but real shorter, stands up around my head like a big ball of fluff. Then Jules takes out some black

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powder named like “Hanna,” she tells me she uses for tattoos on people that don’t stay forever, and puts some water in that powder and makes a mud paste she covers my hair with. She says this stuff will heal some of the damage in my hair, and that I need a new look anyway.

Something good is happening when she’s massaging that paste into my hair. She’s sitting in front of me real close petting my head, and I think it’s probably done in there good, but she keeps going anyway, petting my head and she’s just a few inches away from me. She knows I’m mad at her, but she’s gotta see I’m other things at her too. We’re breathing like we’re outta breath or trying to hold our breath, both of us are, even though we aint been doing nothing but sitting there. She got my head in her hands, sitting on her knees in front of me in that tent where I’m all burnt up and head-full-of-goo-like.

I look her right in the eyes then, but I don’t know what kinda look I got on my face, it might still look angry to her, and it is. We’re looking at each other. I remember that look on her face. Her face looks like a big confused question mark, even scared, and I felt all dead-set still. Something in me then wanted to pull away. I wanted to make her work for it, make her wonder, make her beg. I coulda got up and walked out, and she’d have to be following me around if she wanted anything. Then I’d have her then like a sorry dog on a leash. But hell, that aint my style and aint what I got in me to be doing. Still, I don’t quite feel like going to get her either, not after what she just done to me. So we’re sitting there breathing too much, nose to nose, and she takes her hands out of my hair and keeps looking me in the eyes. I just lean back, still stone-faced, and think, if she wants me, here I am. I lean back and she can come on if she wants.

She sighs and puts her hands in her lap and says, “Well, that’ll be set in a few hours. I think it’ll look all right.” She’s still talking about my damned hair like that’s what’s going on.

I say, “You just set me on fire, you know that?”

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She looks away then and looks back at me with some pitiful look, her big brown eyes begging forgiveness and her mouth not knowing how to say it, her eyebrows going up in the middle, she says, “I didn’t mean to set you on fire.”

I was feeling pretty cold and hot then, I say, “Don’t you get out that shit shovel. I know what you meant to be doing and you done it.” I’m being a pouty kid. I look down and say, “You don’t like me or my Aryan and yer just an old Catholic trying to burn us alive.”

She laughed at me then and squints her face up funny. I keep going then, I say, “But you don’t even know me enough to be killing me.

You don’t even know me at all or what I got in me, and if you did, you wouldn’t dare put your hand in it.”

She says, “Why not?”

I say, threatening, “Cause yer the one that’s gonna get burned.”

I’m looking mad at her, but it’s no use, cause it’s like one of us is made of metal and the other’s a magnet. I’m leaning back and she’s sitting there looking with sorry and compassion and fear in her eyes at me, but then her hand is like it’s working on its own, her hand is reaching out and grabbing my hip and she’s just sliding up on me, over on top of me, and then my hands, too, feel like they’re working on their own, cause I’m grabbing her and holding tight to her side and there we are.

When she’s kissing me she’s pressing hard with everything and there was that fire all over again, dizzy kind of fire. She held me down like I’m a real lady, almost like she’s mad at something, and she did dare, she did dare to put her hand in it. Boy did she ever.

She did first thing. One minute she’s out there in the world far away from me, and the next minute there she was, part of me. I wanted to die. Felt like what? This one I’ve been wanting who aint even been giving me the time, felt like what they say is redemption, like getting the holy ghost when she reach under my skirt and pull back my panties then pressed. And I pulled them all the way off and let her slip in and sucked on the metal on her lip. She was in me so far all of a sudden, like she was gonna die if she didn’t. So 114

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fast, tearing at me and pushing. That feeling aint just about down there. It’s about feeling that person, her, the feeling of who she is, so close, so close inside me. And I was like a puppet then, like she’s gonna get through my belly all the way to my chest, my throat, and out the top of my head. She was a quiet one. She was all tough guy on top of me makin me scream, keeping quiet, sweat starting to fall down on me from her hair. I pulled up her shirt and pulled down her pants. And when I touched her, she looked like she didn’t expect that. She musta thought I didn’t know what to do, cause she sure looked surprised, but she looked grateful. When I touched her, she made a sound I never heard her make that was sweet and weak. Then she said please, please. She kept saying please, please while I was touching her. She only asked me please when I was touching her, which is strange cause that’s when she was getting it. She was only begging for it when she was already getting what she wanted. It weren’t just a minute or two, and her begging got louder. Then I feel somethin I never feel before. So much wetness, like a spilled bucket coming out all over my hand and leg. Jules stops and says sorry. She looked at me like she’s a kid who spilled the milk and was looking to see if I was gonna get mad or not. I didn’t. I laid her down and looked her in her eyes. She pulled off my shirt all the way and was looking at my breasts like they the Mona Lisa. I took it all off of her, and her body was beautiful.

All of her hard lines and her black hair glistening. I kissed her, sitting on her, and she pulled her nails down my arm, then I started growling, wanting to be tearing. It was a dark thing we were doing.

Sometimes when you want something so much, there’s a darkness in it, like it’s another world, the underworld, the world under that thing you’ve been wanting that you’ve been pretending wasn’t there. All I wanted was to hear her begging me, again and again; to know that she’s wanting me like I was wanting her, all this time, it wasn’t just a made-up thing. To hear her begging and trying to tear me apart to get in. I kissed her all over, and she was the one burning up. Each kiss became a bite, and she melted through my Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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teeth. Then I put her in my mouth and I noticed something then I didn’t notice when I was touching her. She had an earring there, too. There. It scared me. I stopped moving, but she said it was all right, that it didn’t hurt and to act like it wasn’t even there. I did.

It felt like two smooth pebbles on my tongue, one metal and one skin, getting swollen. Then she said please, please, and it happened again, like a bucket poured on my head from some clumsy maid in her. It was all over me. It sprayed up like a fountain. It made me smile like a kid playing in a faucet. Didn’t take much getting used to. I smiled big, and she pulled me close. I was all covered in wet from her. we made it till we was tired out I guess, cause I don’t even remember falling to sleep. When I wake up the next day, everything looked like the Bambi movie. The sun was shining bright and the birds singing loud like someone was playing them on a speaker, it was so perfect. The sky was so blue and the grass was so green I thought maybe someone done slip me a happy pill. Jules is cooking on the fire outside the tent, some food she call Tempo or something weird those vegetarians eat. I poke my head outta the tent and say, “Hi there.” When she look at me, she start laughing up a riot. I don’t know why she’s laughing, but she tells me I gotta go wash in the pond. She starts wiping my face and laughing telling me I look a mess and I gotta go down to the pond. She says she already done washed, same thing happened with her. She lift up her shirt and show me, she got like black streaks dyed on her sides and five perfect black finger prints on her back. It’s from that stuff she rub in my hair. And then it getting wet. That wet from her. It musta made it run.

I go down to the pond and when I see my reflection I see what she’s talking about. I got that gunky stuff still in my hair, but it done got all over me too. I got Jules’s hand print in black on my arm. It’s on my fingers. I look down in my underself and all between my legs is black as shoeshine. The worst part though is my face. Most

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of my face is stained all from my forehead down to my neck where it’s streaked. I wash all that stuff off and outta my hair. It done did what it was supposed to do, dyed my new short hair black, but it did what it do with other things too. I figure I’m gonna look like a new person now. I feel like a new person now, so it’s right that I look it. I don’t look so country anymore with my big choppy ball of black hair. But I look more like a new person than I would like, cause that stuff done dyed my face black, and no matter how much I’m washing, it’s not coming off. Jules said if I wash every day with soap, it’s gonna come off my skin in a few, but that it stays in hair longer. But even a few days like this, I think, is no good.

I’m washing my face there panicking about it, kneeling at the pond, when Christie comes up behind me. She says, “Jules said you were down here.” She asks if I’m feeling okay, and if I’m ready to do the show we prepared with her tonight. When I turn around to answer her though, she freaks out. “What the hell did you do to yourself ?” Christie holler at me. She aint never cussed anyway before and that worries me, but I’m all fed up right then.

I stand up and say, “I aint done nothing to myself!”

She grabs my head in her hands and starts turning it in the sun, inspecting my face, “Is this from the burn?” she asks, with unbelieving all over her voice.

“Naw,” I say, “this rubbed off on me from Jules.”

She gets dead still then and holds my head in her hands and looked me square in the eye, “You know, hunny, it doesn’t work like that. You know that, don’t you?”

I pull my face back then and smack her away. Boy, these city folks can sure be patronizin as hell sometimes. “Naw, jeez Louise!”

I say. “Jules put this Oriental muck on me and had it on her hands, and it got on my face, cause she a big gusher. I sleep in it on my head too, and I guess all that just done me in like this. You should see my underparts,” I tell her. “My underworld a real underworld now. It looks like a mudslide down there.”

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so, with all kinds of mixed emotions fighting on her face. She starts shaking her head. “We can’t do the show now,” she says.

I get mad then, “What’re you talking about we can’t do the show? We been practicing for months. Why the shittin hell not?”

I never talk mad to Christie before, but she done got me going.

“Hmmmpmmm,” I say, “we’re doing the show, you bet yer sweet Billy we’re doing it!”

Christie sighed then and told me we’re gonna need a lot of soap. She drags me back to the tent where she and Jules sit and scrub my face for a good hour, but it wasn’t doing nothing but making me spotty, like freckly, lighter, like more brownish, I guess, browner than black, almost more natural looking. Christie says this isn’t working and says again we can’t do the show.

Jules is just looking at me, laughing at the whole thing. But I’m mad. I ask Christie again, why she’s so upset. “Why can’t we do the show?” I ask.

She says real serious, that I can’t, I just can’t go out there on a horse named Aryan and juggle to Bessie Smith songs in blackface wearing my tutu with my hair all puffed up like that. Jules starts laughing then so hard water’s coming out of her eyes. “Oh God,” she says, “is that what you’re going to do?”

I’m fighting for it though. I say Christie is being a yellow chicken. “No one knows the goddamned horse’s name,” I tell her, “And boy, what are you being so squirmy for? These people here,” I say, “well, these people here don’t care if I look weird. There’s girls here used to be boys and boys used to be girls and things in between. There’s folks here with beards tattooed on their faces and people with feathers in their hair acting like animals. If they don’t even have to be human all the time, why I gotta always be the same color? Why can’t I be a different color for a while if I want to?”

Jules is nodding at me and laughing it up, looking at me like maybe I’m crazy or a genius and ridiculous. I wish she’d stop laughing like that. I don’t think this is funny. Christie’s just looking skeptic at me.

Christie says, “It doesn’t work that way!” She’s yelling.

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Then I yell too, “Well then I’ll make it work that way! It probably didn’t work people could be birds till that girl over there,” I point to the tent across the way where that bird-girl is, “till she decided to glue feathers all over and start flapping around!”

Christie hollers, “It’s not the same thing!”

I holler back, “Now listen, we’re doing the show and I’m doing it as a pickaninny. Maybe I’m liking being a pickaninny for a while.

There’s nothing wrong with being a pickaninny!”

“But they are going to think you’re making fun of pickaninnies!”

Christie hollers. As soon as she says this though, she gasps and covers her mouth like she wants to put something back in it, all shocked and embarrassed. She shakes her head no and stands.

Then she just says, “Oh fucking hell,” and leaves, and I still don’t know who won or what we decided.

Jules is sitting there quiet now, but she’s got a big open smile on her face that doesn’t really quite look like a smile and her eyes are as big and round as plates looking at me, her eyebrows way up on her head. “What?” I ask.

She bites her bottom lip and sighs big. She tried to say my name but it comes out wrong. Then she asks how to say it. I say it and she just stares at me. “Where did you get that name?” she ask.

“My mom done made it up.”

Jules nods. We’re sitting on the ground outside the tent and she’s fidgeting around, acting again like I’m something she gotta deal with, but now it’s more like something she don’t mind having to deal with so much. “Is there something else I can call you?”

I shrug myself and can’t believe the words coming out when they do but there they come, “Helen calls me Mya,” I say. It feels like something’s being cut out of me when I say it. But I guess it works, cause mya is somewhere in my real name anyway. I look upset, so Jules put her arm around me, and says, “Okay, Mya, come here. It’s gonna be all right. We’ll figure it out.” She plays with my hair and tells me it looks good. We lay down on the grass and start pulling leaves apart. Jules tells me she’s sorry she dyed Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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me. I say that it’s okay. I don’t mind, except it’s got Christie all upset.

Jules is in a curious talking mood. She asks me where I’m from.

I just shrug and say, “Over yonder,” but she keeps pushing.

“Over yonder, where?” she asks. She’s pushing real hard to hear my story, asking how come I come here and where from and all. I got a funny feeling though. Don’t wanna tell her all my story. Don’t wanna tell anyone, actually. She asks me where my parents are and all, but I just shrug and shake my head no. So many reasons I don’t want to tell her. Can’t talk about big cats and blood, and that I was only seventeen. She’ll freak. I keep quiet. So Jules starts. I guess she thinks it’ll get me going if she tells me her story. So she tells me all about being a kid out in the suburbs in California, and how awful it was, cause it was clean and everybody was so fine they didn’t think about nothing important, she says. But really, at first it don’t sound so bad to me. She says her parents were religious. I ask if they were strict Catholics. She says, no, they were Hindus. She says they don’t get along no more. I ask if it’s cause she converted to Catholic. She was laughing at me then and saying no, but I still don’t really get her that way. Anyway, she says what was wrong wasn’t the religion, mostly. It was that her dad was an accountant and her mom taught algebra, and that’s what done them in. She says they add up everything like in numbers, and all her life they been adding her up like she’s a number in their book they trying to divide her with all the other stuff in their life and forgetting the remainder. She say this and pound her fist in the grass with a look on her face that makes me think maybe it was really bad there in a clean quiet way I don’t usually think of as bad. She run away when she was seventeen, four years before we laying on the ground telling our stories. And now, she says, she’s never goin back there.

She rolls over then on her back and just stares at the sky like she’s mad at it for being blue. I lean over and give her a kiss on the cheek so she tries a smile. Some folks walk past our tent then.

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of them got green hair and they all got spikes and things coming out their ears and faces, but they giving me the weirdest look, like they’re all just hypnotized. They don’t say nothing, but their heads almost fall off the way they looking at me and turning when they pass, and I remember that I woke up black today. I can’t believe they looking at me like that, looking like they look. Folks is sure funny.

Jules turn, looking at me then like she’s waiting for it. I figure she done told me hers, so I go on and let mine rip. At first I don’t even know if it will come out, especially that first part about my mom.

But it does. It comes out real quick and simple, “My momma’s dead,” I say. “I done fed her to a tiger when I was little, after she get out of jail. It was an accident, the tiger thing. She was only in jail for two years, wasn’t no big thing, but now she’s gone for good.”

And then I just sail through the rest like that, real quick and simple.

It only really takes a few minutes to tell my story. I think I did a good job. But when I’m done, Jules got this look on her face that makes me know that’s the last time I ever tell my story to anyone.

People can’t help what their heads do with stories you tell them, no matter what they want to do with them, they can’t help what their heads do with them. She’s looking at me like she like, I don’t know what, like she done swallowed something got stuck in her throat, and like, I think, like now she forgives me for not being right about anything and not knowing things others seem to know, and swinging at people and the growling and all. And I guess that shouldn’t be bad, but I don’t want to be forgiven really. I don’t like the feeling of being forgiven, especially for things I’m not quite sure what they are and things I aint said sorry for.

I roll over on my back then, looking at the sunlight though the trees. Jules still staring with that sorry, forgiving, stunned look on her face. She don’t move or nothing, she’s just still as a statue, staring at me like I’m a sorry wonder. I hear someone come running up. It’s Christie. She’s standing over us looking triumphant, holding a something in her hand. “I’ve got it!” she says. “We can do the Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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show. We can fix you up for the show.” I look at what she got in her hands she’s so happy about. It’s a white jar. It’s a jar of white paint.

“This is thick,” she says. “It’s body paint, from the clown. It’s thick enough to cover it up.”

“But that’s like ghost skin,” I say. “It’s white as a sheet, I never been that white. What’s the difference between this black and that white? Everybody knows I’m not neither.”

“It doesn’t have to look natural,” Christie says. “It’ll just look like you’re in costume.”

“But I look like I’m in a costume now, already.”

Christie sighs then like she’s getting real frustrated. “Will you just put it on! I told you, you can’t go out there like that. You just can’t!”

It’s a good thing I like Christie, a good thing she been like a momma to me these months, cause when she yell at me like that, I want to smash something and start growling. But I just huff, then I let them go on and gunk up my face, again. It was just the kinda day people wanting to be gunking up my face, I guess.

They get done with it and they looking at me with their arms folded like I’m a picture in a museum, talking about me like I’m not even there.

“What do you think?” Christie ask Jules.

“Well, you can still see the black under the paint around her eyes. We can’t really put it in any closer. And her lips too.”

“She needs to try not to lick her lips.” Christie says, titling her head at me. “God, you know what she looks like?”

“What?”

“She looks like a black person in white face.”

“Yeah, she does,” Jules says and laughs. She’s making me mad laughing at me all the time.

“Is that bad? I mean, is that better than the other way?” Christie asks.

“Why are you asking me?” Jules shrugs big and shoves Christie and laughs. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Christie nods, “I think it’s okay. I think this will be fine.”

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when we start setting up our spot, a bigger crowd than I

thought we’d get gathers round. Looks like almost everyone at the gathering come over to see our show. I know that got mostly to do with Aryan, and maybe to do with the show we put on accidently the night before when Jules set me on fire. I guess we known now.

Aryan’s so calm and big and white and red eyed. She’s just calm as a kitten then cause I took her out running in the field an hour before, run her steam off her. That musta been something to see, me with a ghost face and black tutu, riding her through the field. I grab her head in my hands and tell her we gonna do like we practiced, and ask her not to drop me. It seems like she nods at me. She blows out her nose and nods her head. I think she nods yes at me, but maybe she just had an itch.

Christie got on her silver unitard. She’s stretching herself out.

The crowd is in front of us in a half circle, people finding their places to sit in the grass. It’s a bigger crowd than I ever seen, more people than I ever seen looking at me at one time. what we ’ re doing is real simple. I stand on Aryan and do some

fancy juggling moves in time with the music while Christie does her interpretation dancing around us.

We just got two songs we doing; “Bleeding Heart Blues,” which is slow, and then “Send me to the ’Lectric Chair.” But we got two versions of the last one. First Bessie Smith sings it real bluesy, then a rock band take over, and do a real fast crazy version of it. That’s my favorite part and our grand finale. When that happens, Christie don’t look like a confused ballerina no more, in that part, she does all kinds of flips and crazy dances, and I juggle so fast I think my heart is going to break.

Chistie gets done stretching. She stands and look at the crowd.

They get quiet. She introduces us. She say my name as best she can, and the people in the crowd all give me that look that makes my stomach hurt that people get when they hear my name, all at the same time, they give it to me. It pass over their faces quick Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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though, then pass away. And I’m glad Christie called me by my real name the best she could, even got one of the tongue clicks in the right place. But she don’t introduce Aryan right, she just says my name and then introduce Aryan as “and her magic horse.” I take my position on top Aryan with my gunky ghost face. Christie pushes the play button on our player.

Bessie Smith starts up with crooning out her old story that always make my heart feel like a sack of broken glass.

When you’re sad and lonely Thinking about you only Feeling disgusted and blue . . .

Christie’s doing her moves then that at first I always think don’t look much different than her stretching. But then she starts doing some other stuff that look like she’s actually doing something after that. I start then juggling when she do a move that she call down dog or doggy down or something. I start my juggling simple. I guess we look pretty good. That must be something to see when I stand up on Aryan and start my juggling then while Christie’s dancing and Bessie Smith singing words that remind me so much of myself.

I give up every friend that I had Yes, I give up every friend that I had I give up my mother I even give up dear old dad The look on the faces of the people in the crowd make me think that song make them feel like it about themselves too, and I wondering then, what it is in their lives that make them feel like that.

Some of them are leaning over and pointing and whispering in each other’s ears. Even though I know there’s a lot of reasons they could be pointing and whispering at me, I got a feeling it’s probably because I look like Christie said, like a black person in face 124

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white. But I just keep going, cause Christie said it would be okay, and I feel like she’s the kinda person who’s always right. But then, when I was young like that then, at that time, I feel like everyone’s always right, everyone but me. I always feel at that time then that I’m just making it around people, that I’m trying to survive around them, and what they say must be real and right and what I feel must be imaginary and wrong, and dangerous or a bad secret. the song ends . Everybody claps and cheers. That felt so good. I

never had nobody cheering for me before, and this was like almost all the hundreds of people that was there. I think, if they like that, they gonna love the next part.

Bessie Smith start singing again, and I think, we’re tricking em.

She sings it all throaty, slow and heart crushing with that playful trumpet like she do, and I juggle and spin and Christie dance while that trumpet ragtimey music playing, Bessie says, Judge you wanna hear my plea Before you open up your court But I don’t want no sympathy Oh judge, judge, lordy judge Send me to the ’lectric chair Judge, judge, sweet mister judge Send me to the ‘lectric chair The crowd’s clapping then while we doing it and laughing cheerful like. Christie’s dancing funny, wiggling her hips and pretending to fan herself, stepping and turning in time like she’s a lady in an old piano bar. Then Bessie Smith say, Judge, judge, good kind judge Burn me ’cause I don’t care I don’t want to spend no Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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Ninety-nine years in jail So judge, judge, good kind judge Send me to the ’lectric chair The song ends, but that aint the end. My favorite part’s coming now. In the silence, I sit down on Aryan, and turn her around and we ride fast, away from the crowd into the field behind us, then turn around and ride right on back, fast and jumping, looks like we gonna trample everybody. Right when we make it back, the drums crash and Aryan runs in, stands up on her hind legs and stomps em down right in time with the drum crash. Then it’s “Send me to the ’Lectric Chair” again, but a fast rock band playing it. I hop up on Aryan’s back and juggle like a maniac, and Christie’s doing her best thing now, she’s doing flips around me. The crowd’s going crazy, whistling and hollering. Through all of it, I can hear Jules cheering for me. That was the best part for me, hearing one voice cheering for me above all the crowd. when it ’ s over , we’re famous. Everybody’s coming up to us, shaking our hand, petting Aryan, telling us how good we are. I got my own little beginnings of a following. People circling around me, looking at me like they aint never looked at me before, like I’m someone big and special, like I really done something important. It aint too long though before the questions I don’t know how to answer start.

There was about fifteen people around me, and more coming over. Four of them are close, talking over each other. I feel like I’m on a red carpet being interviewed. There’s a guy there who looks real young. He’s as pale as I am in face paint but he aint wearing none. He’s what you’d call a gothic kid, with long black hair in his face, chubby and tall, and, I remember, he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Pro-Death” in big red letters. He comes up and ask me “Is your face supposed to be a ghost or what?” I shrug, and say that it’s just what happened. He asks what I mean by that. But before I can answer, others start talking.

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He was with two girls. They were black girls and they were gothic too. One of them was gothic like she was new at it, but the other girl was really something to look at. She had her hair all afroed up and dyed bright blue, blue as it could be, and all kinds of rings in her bottom lip and crazy paint around her eyes. They were right up against me. The one with the blue afro asks, “Why did you do white face paint over black? Is it supposed to be a statement about the songs, I mean, the death penalty and all?”

When she asks that, I start looking around for Christie. But then, right off, this other woman holler at me, “Or is this your idea of a joke?” She’s standing next to the goth kids, an older white lady, a real skinny hippie type. She didn’t know the others, but she’s up on me with them, asking me hard questions loud. The kids weren’t asking questions loud like her. This lady looked mad at me.

I get mad back, I say hard, “It aint no joke! It’s just what happened.”

The woman hollered back with a sneer in her voice, “What do you mean, it’s just what happened?”

The girl with the afro looking at me with big eyes, like she wants to like me, but she’s worried. She says, “Wait a minute, why don’t you tell us what you mean by it. It’s interesting, but I just want to know, to understand what your point is.”

The goth boy butt in then, he says, “It seems like you’re making a statement that white people don’t get executed as often as black people? I mean, that’s what I get. Or maybe, like, you’re the ghost of blackface, like the ghost of racist minstrels?”

Now, then I know I got an out. I don’t give a good goddamn what they mean then, but they look like they happy about their ideas, and I figure I could just say yes to them then and it would all be fine. Maybe I woulda done that right there, if that old angry hippie hadn’t done what she did then.

She says, “Is that what this is about?” and she wave her hand over my face, getting in my face when she say this, and her voice is so sneering, when she wave it in my face, then she feel at my hair, Track Four: Bleeding Heart Blues

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without even asking she touch my hair, and right off, I smack her hand and hiss.

She gasped, and held her hand against her chest like I really hurt it, and then some people behind her say, “Hey, hey, what’s going on?” and stuff, and more people murmuring and looking bad at me.

I’m still mad though, I say at her, “Don’t come pokin around me, you old hag.”

Then the girl with the afro looking bad at me and the other girl, her friend who’s new at goth, step up real serious and say, stern, “Listen, we liked your show, but we’ve got every right to ask you what you mean by this. We’re just asking questions. We have every right to have a transparent discussion.” She’s talking like Jules.

The chubby white boy with the pro-death shirt is patting the hippie on the back while she’s hyperventilatin, he turns his sorry eyes on me and say, “If you create a controversy, you should be able to explain it.”

“We just want to know what kind of statement you’re trying to make. There’s no need for violence,” the girl with the afro says.

Something strong bubbled up in me then. I’m real tired of hiding and explaining myself all the time, and a big feeling bubbling up in me then, like maybe what I think is right and real too, maybe I’m just as right and real as everybody else. That’s when words start falling out of my mouth. I say, “What do you mean there aint no need for violence? There’s as much need for one thing as another.

How else do I get people to stop poking at me when they poking, cept running? And I aint no yellow chicken fat. Now y’all got something going on wrong,” I say. “This here show wasn’t about my face. This show weren’t about the color of my face. This here show was about music and dancing and juggling, and all you can think about is what color my face is. Hmph. Not even asking me how long I been juggling, or when I learn to ride horses or nothing!

Just going on about colors!”

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aint been talking to who standing around there get this look, and I see that what I say was something right and real. The chubby boy say, “It’s like a challenge to the audience,” and nods smiling.

The little new goth girl cover her mouth and says, “Oh my gosh.

I can’t believe you got me. Wow!” The girl with the afro looks happy and nodding, she says, “It’s like a multi-level performance. It’s like, interactive. The performance is still happening here, and we’re part of it. This is so good.”

“Do you do this kind of thing a lot?” the other girl asks.

Some guy with a bushy beard standing behind her says, “Are you anti-pacifism?”

Right then, Christie and Jules pushes their way through. I thank God then, which I don’t usually do. Felt like these people was never gonna stop, and it was making my head hurt. Jules and Christie give me a big hug. People start telling Christie that it was a good show. Jules takes me right there and kisses me on the mouth. Christie tells the crowd, thanks, and that we’re tired now and we gotta go eat something. Those kids shake my hand and say it was nice meeting me. They say maybe we’ll hang out later, but I think not if they gonna give me more headaches. jules put her arm around me. Christie grabbed Aryan’s bit

and we started walking away. That hippie lady’s still going though, she say at me as I’m going, she says, “You’re from the South, aren’t you?”

Jules just keeps her arm around me and keeps walking, while Christie turns around and waves at her and says, “Have a good night,” smiling big like she aint even heard her question, smiling when she don’t mean it. I don’t know how she can do that. She’s a real performer. that was our last day at the gathering. We pack all our stuff up and head back that night through the mountains in the darkness, Aryan’s in the wagon behind us. Me and Jules, neither of

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us drive, so we made a pallet in the back of the van. We just laid there on the floor and cuddled, looking at the stars through the back window bumping over the winding roads. She was happy that night. That was the first time I ever really saw her happy. Actually, that’s about the only time I ever really saw her happy.

We’re cuddling and kissing. She’s running her fingers over my stomach and petting me like I’m her baby. She’s smiling then and feeling good no matter what we’re talking about, and we’re talking about it all. She asks me about Helen. She asks, am I in love with her. I don’t know how to answer the question about being in love with Helen. I just tell her I got a lotta love in me for Helen, she done help me a lot and she good to me most the time. Jules says she got another lover too and she don’t want us to make each other choose. That hadn’t even occurred to me before, but when she say that, I know that’s what people do, I guess. I don’t care who else she makes it with as long as she keeps holding me like a baby and not being afraid to put her hand in it, deep in, all the way through me when I need her to be going through me.

I’m petting her little mane of a Mohawk and she’s kissing me with her big lips and serious eyes. Everything in her’s calm and settled and good that moment. When she tells me about her situation then, she didn’t get the look she get every time she talk about it after then. That time, she didn’t get that look that filled up her eyes like a black tsunami wave that you might mistake for the night sky darkening before it crashes, that was so like that look I get when I get the tiger in me like some people get the holy ghost. She didn’t get that bad look then, her words didn’t match her face, and maybe because her face was so serene and easy to look at then, I didn’t listen like I should have. I didn’t know how hard it touched her. She just started telling me stories, and God fuck me, I wasn’t listening right. I was just looking at her beauty, and hearing the poem in the way she talk, not hearing her hellfire when she starts going on.

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track five

Private Dancer

“ i can ’ t imagine , I can’t remember exactly what it was I was looking for when I first came here,” Jules told me. “I guess I just was looking for a safe place, but I don’t remember what I thought I was looking for then. Maybe I found something that I needed, and then I realized what I was missing before, so now when I think of before, I think I must have been looking for the something I have.

Maybe you only know what you’re looking for in life after you’ve found . . . something that will serve as an answer . . . to a question you’ve never really asked, but a question, when you look back, you think you must have been asking yourself the whole time.”

“What question?” I ask Jules.

“How should I live? What do I need from this life? You know, the question.”

“I was just lookin to get away. I done did that. I aint lookin for nothing now. Just lookin not to go back,” I say.

“I know. I know. I was looking for a safe space, and I found it.

I’ve always felt safe with these people. I know you don’t, I mean, I know you didn’t really feel safe here at first.”

“I don’t guess I ever did though, anywhere. It aint no different here than anywhere, cept it aint quiet here. I like that.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t feel safe. I know you don’t understand these people. But you just started living in this world really. There’s something refreshing about that though, about you, you know, for me anyway. I’m sure, for some people, you’re terrifying, and 131

for Christie, well, you’re confusing and frustrating, but she loves you like you’re her family. I’m not going to say you need to learn, because I’m not here to teach you. And as far as I can see, almost everything that comes out of your mouth is offensive in some way, baby. If you get mad, you bite. If you want sex, you hump. If you got an itch, you tell everybody where it is, and then you scratch it right in front of them, don’t you?” Jules asks me that like a little joke, then sticks her finger in my mouth and we laugh while I’m suckin on it. “Yeah you do. But some things are more touchy than others. I’m brown. I am brown, you know? And that means something in this world.”

“Don’t mean nothing to me,” I say.

“Well, it should, cause it means something to me,” Jules says, real serious.

I make big hard mistakes sometimes.

“I’m a lot of things, but that’s one of the things I am.” Jules says.

“We’re dykes you know? You know that? We’re women. Women are the niggers of the world. You know that?” I just shake my head no. Her words don’t match her face. Her face is calm with a smile, but something pinched on the sides of her mouth. I just keep looking at her face and keep quiet, wondering what her words are supposed to be to me. “Never fall in love with a straight woman.

Never fall in love with a rich, straight, white woman. Trust me.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

She laughs at me then, soft and sweet, she laughed and kissed me on the head. “You’re such a baby.” She looks me over, and I think she’s gonna ask how old I am, but she don’t. I gotta tell her sometime, probably, and she’s gonna flip then. “Never fall in love with a rich person,” she says, looking up at the stars, smiling, smiling like smiling is winning cause she’s able to smile when she saying this. “If you meet rich people, try your best to pretend to be rich too. They give you everything if they think you don’t need it, but as soon as they know you need it, as soon as they know you need something, they hold on tight to what they’ve got, and that’s fine I 132

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guess, I guess that’s fine. But worse than that, then, if they see you really need it, they think you must be taking theirs from them, so they take what little you’ve got, like you owe it to them, like they think it’s theirs too. I don’t know why they do that. I guess they think if you don’t own, then you need to be owned, and if you don’t own and you’re not owned, they feel obligated to step in and own you. I don’t know.” She’s lookin at the sky. She give a big sigh.

“Never fall in love with a married woman.”

“Is that what you done?” She looks down at me like she’s surprised I’m here, like I interrupted her conversation with the stars.

We hit a bump. She pulls me closer in her arms and tells me, “You’re so good. You’re so much better than her.”

“Who?” “Delia.”

“Delia?”

She rolls over on her back and put her head on my stomach. I sit up and pet her hair. Her face looks calm and her eyes aren’t filled with a tsunami wave coming to crash everything down. Not that night. Not when she talk about it then. Not like every other time she talked about it.

“ mrs . delia michigan . It was her husband I spoke with first, James Michigan. Don’t ever trust people with names like that.

Your name, your real name, is the most trustworthy name I’ve ever heard.” She tilted her head back at me and nodded to make sure I hear what she said, then she went back to smiling at the slow passing stars and telling me about it. “It was two years ago. I was living in an abandoned hospital then. The hospital still had heat and electricity and everything. It was just abandoned by the city, but they were going to reopen it as something else, so I squatted there before I met Christie. I didn’t have much money or any way that I could see to make much money, so I put an ad in the paper with a number from a pre-paid phone I bought. He wasn’t the first person to answer the ad, but anyway, Mr. Michigan called me. When I Track Five: Private Dancer

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picked up the phone, he said, ‘I know your ad said no men, but you wouldn’t actually be doing anything with me.’ He wanted to watch while I made love to his wife. That’s even the way he said it, ‘make love.’ I guess he didn’t think women could fuck. Hmp. He knows now though.” She laughed when she said this and wiped her nose with her arm. “I said I didn’t do that. But he offered me more money than anyone else had, so I said yes. I guess he has plenty of money. I saw his picture in the paper a few weeks later. I must have seen him before, but I didn’t know who he was then. He’s an executive of the Monsanto Company. Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head no.

“It’s this big international company that does genetic engineering. It’s based in Saint Louis. His picture was in the paper because people from all over the world were here protesting it, again. They do every year. That year it was especially big. I wasn’t part of those protests. Chris and Christie were though, they helped coordinate those protests five years ago during the W.A.F. Do you know what that is?”

I shake my head no.

“The World Agricultural Forum. I know all about that shit now.

There were people from all over the country gathering here demonstrating against Monsanto during the W.A.F. Monsanto brought their own private security services in and everything, working with the police to arrest us. The police actually shut down three of the five collectives in the city, kicked out the people who lived in them, tore their places up and pissed on everything. They destroyed their fucking bikes, even. They justified it all based on intelligence they got from Monsanto’s private security service, which is totally illegal. They even arrested people preemptively. I heard it was total chaos. All over different parts of the city, they arrested sixteen of the organizers two days before the demonstration. One guy was just walking down the sidewalk, alone. They arrested him for inciting a riot. Another woman was arrested for littering. Another one for unpaid parking tickets. It was like that.” Jules cocked her head 134

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and hissed. “I thought they couldn’t do that, that even though this is America, we still have some rights, right? Apparently, the week before the demo, the police had declared a state of emergency, and even made public the fact, in their words, that they could arrest ‘anyone who looked like an anarchist or potential protester on the spot.’ They can do that kind of shit now because of the Patriot Act.” I was staring up at her blank. “You don’t know what that is either?” I just keep staring. I didn’t feel like shaking my head no again. Jules was talking big and serious, and it bugged me I couldn’t really follow along.

“Anyway, my point is, James Michigan is an asshole. He’s the worst of the worst of the rich and powerful. He’s evil and he’s destroying the world, and he has one of the most beautiful women.

I should just bomb that fucking factory,” she says calm and laughing. “Kill two birds, you know? What do you think? You want to bomb Monsanto with me?”

“I don’t got no beef with those birds.”

“You would if you understood what they do.”

I shrug.

“Anyhow, I went over to where he told me to meet them, to a room in the fucking Chase Park Plaza.” She say those words like they cuss words. “He’s a fucking cocky son of a bitch. Having me meet them to do that at the fucking Chase. Phhhh. I know what he paid for me, but I can’t imagine what he paid for that goddamned room. Everyone was looking at me like I shouldn’t be there when I came into the lobby. But I knew I was where I was supposed to be and why, and probably, if they knew why, then it would have made sense to them that I was there. They were probably hoping that was why I was there, and scared that was why too. But probably, it probably would have made them feel better to know for sure. I should have just told them, “Don’t worry, I’m a whore. I’m just what you’re thinking. Don’t worry, I won’t be coming up your ladder anytime soon, unless it’s to slip through your back window and rob you blind.” All those skinny old white bitches in their silver jewelry sitting at the Track Five: Private Dancer

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bar under that tacky chandelier with those dried-up old business men in their awful suits. They all have twelve-dollar drinks, like appendages in their hands, swinging them around when they talk, just staring at me like they’re waiting for me to take a shit on the floor when I walked in. I didn’t have anything dressy to wear. I just washed up and put on something clean. But there was no way I could have even looked clean in there. Yours will wash off. Mine won’t. Well, my style of dress didn’t help either.”

“You have this Mohawk then too?”

“Yeah.” She nods up at me and laughs at herself. She picks at under her nails. She points at the window. “There’s Orion. He raped Demeter, so they made him immortal.”

I look out the window where she’s pointing. I wonder if that moon goddess got her constellation in the stars too? Then, while I’m looking, I imagining a constellation for my Aryan out there. I think I can see her riding up there in the stars.

“So, I went in anyway. I just kept my head up and walked over that red carpeted floor, passed the fancy bar, and down the hall with the white and gold etchings everywhere, and I went right up to the elevator man and told him what floor. The elevator smelled like bleach and flowers. There was music playing on the speakers, I remember, it was really old blues, like the kind you danced to today. Standing in the fancy elevator with the doorman, hearing that music kind of pissed me off. I don’t want to sound like a fascist, but I don’t really think those people should be allowed to listen to that music.

“James Michigan had given me the door number. Up on the eleventh floor. It was like a maze up there, but I found it. I knocked on the door. Maybe it would have been different if I had seen her first, if it had been like she was the one in charge, giving her husband a gift, maybe I would have thought about it differently. But he opened the door. He was shining and clean. He didn’t look like those dried-up frumps at the bar. He was wearing a suit too, but it wasn’t awful. It was sleek and dark and tailored, and looked really 136

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good on him, honestly. That suit would have made anyone look like a hundred bucks. His face was soft and smiling. He was lean and handsome, with boyish eyes behind a pair of glasses that made him look cute, deceptively trustworthy. He smiled at me and swung his arm open, motioning for me to come in like people do in old movies.

“The first thing I saw were the big picture windows that looked out over Forest Park. It was such a gorgeous burst of green and sunlight, it made me feel something romantic in me immediately.

No one could have helped but feeling romantic, but it also felt too bright, the romance, like a bad bright trip of romance, because I was also angry and scared, and thinking I never should have agreed to do anything involving a man. It made me too nervous and . . . I don’t know. I’m a gold star, you know?”

“A what?”

“A gold star. It means I’ve never fucked a man.”

“Aw? Me too then. I didn’t know y’all was giving out prizes for that. Is that some queer Catholic thing? Like a queer Mary, or saint?”

Jules snaps out of it for a minute and tickles me while she laughing, “You’re hilarious!” she tells me.

“Go on and tell me your love story, you gold star Mary.”

Jules is sitting up then and looking me in the eye for this part while we’re bumping in the back of the van down the mountains.

“Mya, the first time I saw her, she was standing next to a swan ice sculpture and bottle of champagne glistening next to a picture window looking out over the park in the summer. That’s just too much for anyone. When I turned and looked at her, I forgot he was there, and I know she did too. She was wearing, like, an evening gown. It was shiny and lavender. She has long brunette hair that hangs down past her shoulders, and she looked nervous, she looked scared, and nervousness on an older woman like her, whose face is drawn to look brave, is so beautiful. But when she looked at me, her face softened, like she was relieved.”

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“She a lot older?”

“She’s forty-two, he’s forty-seven. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” She paused. She catch herself, “Except for you.”

Jules getting lost in the story, I guess. I go on and tell her, “You aint gotta say things you don’t mean. I know I aint that good looking.”

“You’re gorgeous, just totally different,” she says and grabs my legs and lays me back, kissing on my neck on top of me.

I push her off me. “I don’t want no constellation prize now. Just go on, I want to know what happened.”

But she looks guilty and she’s looking me in the eye real serious.

Right then, she opens her mouth and tells me, “I love you.”

Something in me sinks real low then, and I get, for the first time, a bad feeling about us. I say, “Well Jules, I been loving you a long time too, but I wish you’d pick a better time to tell me.”

She looks all panicky, “I’m sorry,” she says. “Are you mad at me?”

“Just forget all this nonsense and tell me your story. Now you got me all curious.”

She lays her head on my chest. “Well, like I said, she was the most beautiful woman I’d seen up to that point.”

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ.” I shove at Jules. “What happened?

Just tell me what happened?”

Jules sucks on her lip ring for a second then goes on, “When I turned to her, she looked nervous, then relieved when she really saw me. She was playing with the strap of her dress like a kid.

Then she saw me, and her hands started acting like an adult’s and reached out and shook mine. She smiled so sweetly, like she was in charge of herself again, and like she would take care of me too. She poured us three glasses of champagne. ‘I’m Delia,’ she said. ‘This is my husband, James.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘Mr. Michigan,’ like it was a joke. ‘You spoke on the phone?’ I said yeah, that we’d spoken on the phone.

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“James Michigan was just standing there with his hands in his jacket pockets smiling the friendliest fucking smile, like maybe he was coaching a t-ball game. His round, boyish face looked so innocent, so sweet and peaceful then. He took his glass of champagne, and we all stood together drinking. ‘So,’ Mr. Michigan said, still smiling, ‘I think I made it pretty clear how things will go. I understand the rules and all. I intend to stick to the plan. There’s no reason to feel uncomfortable.’

“Delia gave him a look then, a hybrid of a grimace and a smile, and talked to him the way rich married people talk to each other, like everything’s a very serious joke. She said, ‘Good James, why don’t you make her comfortable with some light conversation?’

She turned to me and put her hand on my arm, ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘he’s not exactly famous for his social skills.’

“I shook my head and tried to smile and told them that it was fine.

“He took another sip of his wine. Then I guess he was trying to make light conversation. He lifted his glass and asked me, ‘So, what do you do?’

“We stared at each other. Delia was like petrified for a second, I think. I opened my mouth and closed it once while I was staring in his eyes, then I opened it again and I said, ‘This. I do this.’ And I nodded at him.

“And he nodded at me then gulped down his glass of champagne and said, ‘Right.’ The whole time, he was smiling this weird, warm smile.

“Delia laughed and looked at me again, shaking her head, ‘Like I told you,’ she said, ‘He’s famous for other things.’ Then she took his arm gently and directed him away. ‘James, hunny, why don’t you go have a seat on the ottoman.’

“The ottoman was in the other part of the suite, against the wall facing the bed.

“He went and sat down, just around the archway, out of sight.

‘We’ll be right in,’ Delia hollered. She stood in front of me, close, Track Five: Private Dancer

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and petted my hair behind my ear the best she could. ‘From now on, just pretend he’s not here,’ she said. She was smiling at me, really smiling though. Her smile wasn’t like his. She was smiling with her eyes; they were looking all over my face, looking for something, like she was searching for something she desperately needed and really believed she might find somewhere in my face. Her smile looked like begging and not wanting to show she was begging.

“It wasn’t the first time I’d done it for money and I like fucking women, so it’s usually pretty easy for me. I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her in. She kissed me hard and was writhing against me, pushing me up on the wall. At first it wasn’t real at all.

It was kind of theatrical. She was making loud noises too soon, so I started grunting and writhing for effect. I can’t even say the moment it changed. But somewhere in there, in the middle of our theater, there was a spark and there was smoke and everything slowed down, and I had a feeling that when the smoke cleared, there was going to be a dead body in the middle of the stage. A real one. I had the feeling that when the smoke cleared, someone was going to be dead.”

I wish I could have seen the look on Jules’s face when she say this, but she was curled on me facing down, and I couldn’t get a good look at her eyes. Her voice though, when she saying this part, sounded more like she was telling it to God than to me.

“That’s what love is,” Jules says. “It’s a dead body on an old worn-out stage that no one sees is a real dead body until long after the smoke clears. Sometimes no one ever figures out it’s real, and it just gets shoved away in the prop room with the rest of the pretty junk.”

I caress Jules’s hair and she just sighs and keeps going, like she’s seeing it all in front of her, all happening again, right then. “I don’t even remember the moment it changed, the moment it became real. One minute we were making noises and writhing and meaning nothing real by it, and then, suddenly, we were in the middle of too intimate a silence, everything was slow and silent. We weren’t 140

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writhing anymore, we were just pressed hard against each other, kissing and breathing deep and slow. We dropped our champagne glasses. They fell silently to the tight beige carpet, let it soak up the wine. I’ll bet it was one of those special carpets with chemicals that make it easy to clean. Delia pulled away then. She had her hand on my cheek and was looking at me with this very solemn, accepting look. She nodded yes, took me by the hand and led me to the bedroom.

“We walked past him. She didn’t look at him at all. She was pretending he wasn’t there, like she had told me to do. But I looked at him. He was still smiling. He nodded hello at me like he was nodding at a friend he was passing on the street. We walked over to the bed holding hands. Delia sat on the edge. She lifted my shirt and started kissing my stomach. I took off my shirt, then she was kissing my breasts. I heard him unzip his pants, but I didn’t look.

I did pretty good at pretending he wasn’t there at first. It was fine, she was really hot, and beautiful, and I was very excited about making love to her.

“But even then, even at first on the bed, it was very intimate between us, too intimate for the fact he was there, or maybe it was more intimate because of that. It was because I allowed it to be.

I didn’t have anything. I needed someone then so bad, and she seemed so in control of everything but somehow so fragile at the same time. Still, she was strong and rich and I liked feeling that she was secretly begging me. I need someone with some kind of power to need me.

“I was on top of her and had taken her dress off. I put my hand between her legs and started ‘making love’ to her that way. Her eyes were closed. At first she wasn’t moving much, then she put her legs up around me and was pulling on me with them. Then I was inside her. And, you know, sometimes your hand is in someone, and sometimes it’s just your hand in them, and then sometimes, you’re in them, and it’s no one part of you in them, all of you is in them. That’s how it was then, when her head went back and she Track Five: Private Dancer

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pulled on me with her legs and I was in her, I was in her. All of me was in her. I could feel her, feel who she was all around me, who she was was touching every part of me. And I didn’t even know her then. But I know her now, and I knew who she was in that moment as much as I ever have.

“I bit her breast, and heard her moan, softly. She grabbed my head and held it so that I had to look in her eyes while I was fucking her, and I saw that she was crying. There were tears running down from her eyes, streaking down the side of her head. I got still for a second, and I was scared I had hurt her. But she kept pushing, and she whispered, ‘Don’t stop.’

“She said, ‘Don’t stop,’ even though she was crying, so I kept fucking her. She whispered, for me to go harder, faster, so I put two fingers in and pounded her like a jackhammer, like a show. But she was really wet and she started screaming. It kept going from very dirty to very intense like a roller coaster. I didn’t really know what was for who, her, him, or me. I pressed my check against hers, and I looked at him while I was fucking her. He was there on the ottoman on the other side of the room. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He had a stunned look on his face, well, you know, he was jacking off in his fancy suit. She noticed I was looking at him. She turned my head back to her and kissed me while I kept on. It wasn’t, probably, what, ten minutes, maybe, and I heard him groan. When he groaned, she forced my head between her breasts and started moving faster and screaming, I think she was trying to block it out, even though he was done groaning. After she let my head up, I stopped fucking her and went down on her for a long time. He shifted a lot, I could hear him. We kept going way after him. He left the room and came back after several minutes with a drink. When she was coming, I caught a glimpse of him over her leg. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He was just watching, sipping his champagne with his legs crossed, and I suddenly really liked making his wife come in front of him. It felt like a fuck you he wasn’t expecting but that he was paying me for. She came really loud. She was like punching the wall above her head and 142

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screaming like someone was killing her. His face was mostly blank, but something moved on it. I think the way she came loud and crazy like that surprised him, actually. I don’t think he’d seen it before. I thought it was done then. She was shaking and kind of moaning calmly and I was sitting there on the edge of the bed, watching her return to herself. I thought it was done, but she sat up and started kissing me, then pushed me down. She slid on top of me and started rubbing me with her fingers. I heard him unzip his pants again.

“I didn’t like that feeling. I really didn’t like feeling him watching me on my back. I didn’t want him to come to me getting fucked.

I was still and quiet, thinking whether this was part of the deal or not. I glanced sideways at him. He was looking very eagerly at us, and I probably should have stopped it then. I almost told her ‘Sorry, but this is as far as I go,’ but she took my face and looked me in the eye. She was moving on top of me and touching me really nicely, and she asked, with this begging but somehow confident look, she asked, ‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’ I didn’t respond.

I just stared at her. Her face was very serious. She said, ‘I think you’re beautiful.’ Then she leaned over, blocking my view of him, and she whispered in my ear, ‘You are surprisingly beautiful.’

“Her hand was on me then and her mouth was on my neck, and something in me melted. I just closed my eyes and let her make me come. He came then too, right before I did. I heard him groan.

This time it was different, it was kind of a long, drawn-out moaning then panting, and she was on me with her beautiful tits and her mouth biting at me, and I felt like something was being taken from me and given to me by her at the same time, and I wasn’t sure what was more valuable, the thing that was being taken or the thing that was being given.”

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at them. Aryan’s back in the old trailer wagon that’s hitched to the van. Christie’s in the car there behind us. I got ones I love around me now, all around me traveling on this curvy, bumpy dark road.

That were a good feeling. And even though she said it at a bad time, Jules still just told me she loves me, and that’s a good feeling too. I don’t know how I got here, to a place where people are telling me they love me, telling me their hardest stories. I wish I coulda stayed there with her laying on my lap in the back of that van forever. If I’da known what was coming, maybe I would never of let her up. Maybe I woulda told that driver to just keep driving forever. Just keep on going on, all around this curvy, bumpy country. I know I aint the only one Jules love, and I guess when she does love, she does it something awful. And I guess it were more than just her love that drove her. It was some bad history that played parts in it too. It were some bad history she aint even really talked about, but it was there in her eyes every time she talked about him, when she said he, and men, and husband, when she said, “Women are the niggers of the world,” and things like that. Mhhhmmm. It was there clear as a gonging bell in my face, clanging in her eyes, and there in her clenched voice. It was there.

“ so then it was over and he paid me. I got dressed and she was sitting in the bed with the sheets up around her. He asked if I wanted cash or a check. She hollered at him, ‘James,’ like he was a kid doing something dumb. He handed me the cash and laughed nervously. I left.

“I kept thinking about her though, all those next days, she was all I could think about. I honestly had no reason to believe I would ever see her again, but something in me just felt this, like, pulling.

Like something in me just knew it wasn’t over. Just less than a week after it happened, my phone rang, and when I picked it up, it was her voice on the other end.

“I remember, she called me Julie. ‘Julie,’ she said, ‘this is Delia.

Do you remember me?’

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“I said, ‘It’s Jules. My name is Jules. Umm, yeah, Mrs. Michigan, I remember you.’

“She said, kind of like a jab, ‘Well Jules, my name is Delia, not Mrs. Michigan.’ Her voice was all deep and raspy, and I felt like I was in some nineteen-forties flick, where the women are all desperate and mysterious, and trying not to show their desperation. I guess that’s the real mystery of those films; why are they all so desperate?

“I said, ‘Hello Delia.’

“She cleared her throat, but it didn’t help, and asked if she could see me again. She wanted to see me that night, but not in the Chase, she wanted me to meet her in a Motel 8 in Kirkwood.

“I met her that night. I met her two days a week for the next month. It was July, and it was so hot even the trees were sweating out the shade. She paid at first. It was kind of weird, cause we spent hours together, in the afternoons, fucking to the sound of the cheap air conditioners rattling, and then just laying around naked, talking about everything. She gave me too much money, really, and bought me gifts, mostly fancy clothes. I was falling in love with her, well, we were falling in love, and she was paying me for it.

“But, then again, I guess when I say we were talking about everything, that’s not entirely true. She was talking about everything. She told me her entire life story that month. She told me all about being a powerful man’s wife, and her love of art, and how she’d started a collection for him, but he didn’t care. She paints landscapes and still lifes and knows they’re awful, but it’s the best she can do. She’s on the board of some arts foundation, and also assists with some publicity for an environmental foundation her husband’s company set up, which is a crock of shit Mosanto is boiling to cover the stench of their destruction. Anyway, she told me all about how active and fulfilling and also torturous, somehow, it is to be a powerful man’s wife. ” “Was she always rich?”

“Yes. Well, yes and no. She was kind of poor, her family was poor when she was a kid. Her grandparents came over here from Track Five: Private Dancer

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Greece. Her mom is just all American. When she was like seventeen, her dad made it big. He partnered in a company that took off making one special little car part. So she really believes in the work ethic and all. That’s her problem, she really believes this country does what it’s supposed to do.

“She was telling me everything, but I wasn’t telling her much that first month. She didn’t know where I lived, for instance. She knew what neighborhood, but I didn’t tell her I was squatting in an abandoned hospital. I knew, when she started taking me out, that she thought of herself as more than my John . . . or Jane, I guess. Not that I didn’t go out sometimes with my Janes. I did.

A lot of women like to meet in public first, have a drink, get to know you, make sure you’re not disgusting or a psychopath. But this was something else. This was like, real dates. She took me to the botanical gardens a few times and then, sometimes she took me for lunches to this empty little café around there.

“About a month after I started seeing her regularly, the second time she took me to the gardens, we were walking past a row of lilies, and she pushed me into some foliage and started kissing me really brutally. She was all out of breath suddenly, really dramatic, her brown eyes blazing. Like I said, like those women in nineteenforties dramas. “‘I love you, God I love you!’ she said, there in the foliage, ‘Do you love me? Tell me you love me Jules. Don’t play with my heart!

Tell me if you don’t love me.’ Now that I talk about it, it was kind of ridiculous really. I was never playing with her heart. People say Greeks are kind of dramatic, right?”

“She sounds a little crazy, Jules.”

Jules looked mad about what I said. “No. She’s not crazy. She was just overcome. She was acting like fucking Helen of Troy right then. But, it was also very hot. There’s something exhilarating about that much passion. It can be deadly too, but I did love her, and seeing her begging me, it kind of knocked me over. I told her I loved her. I told her I loved her desperately. I actually used those 146

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words. She looked like she was going to faint. She was kissing me and biting my neck, and she said, ‘Take me home. Take me home with you today.’

“Something sunk in me then. I held her away from me and told her, ‘Delia, I do love you. I even think I know you pretty well. But I don’t think you really know me. We’re very . . . different . . . types of people.’

“She interrupted me saying, ‘You think I don’t know that? I know that. That’s part of what I love about this.’ Her eyes were like dancing back and forth across my face, and I saw there, in that hopeless look in her eyes, that she really did love me somehow, and she was scared I was going to reject her.

“I said I didn’t think she would want to go to my place. But she was very insistent, so I told her. I said, ‘Do you know that abandoned hospital on Natural Bridge Road?’

“She was frustrated then and kind of yelled, ‘What? No. I don’t know any hospital. What has that got to do with anything?’ “‘That’s where I live,’ I said, ‘I mean, for right now anyway. I’m squatting there . . . till I find a place I like.’ I tried to spin it, but it’s hard to spin squatting in an abandoned hospital. “‘Squatting?’ she said, ‘you’re squatting?’

“I nodded. I don’t think she meant to, or even knew she did it, but she took a step back from me then. She got this look on her face, and I could hear her mind racing. I could hear her wondering what she was worth, feeling like she had betrayed her own value by loving someone without value. But then she took a breath, wiped the look off her face, and nodded yes, in an affirmative move. She smiled seductively. ‘You’re young and wild,’ she said, ‘devil may care.’ Then she leaned back into me and ran her hand through my hair. ‘I don’t care. I love you,’ she said. She shook her hair in the nonexistent wind and said, ‘I don’t care if you’re living in a box in a ditch. I don’t care if you’re penniless or dirty, or how old you are.

I love you.’ I realize, talking about it now, that it’s not just me who thinks she’s like, in some kind of old melodrama, I think she was Track Five: Private Dancer

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thinking that about herself too. She was living that fantasy through me. I didn’t see that then though. That was almost a year ago now.

When she said that to me then, I just took it at face value. My heart swelled up, and I really believed, at least for a second, that she loved me for me, separate from my circumstances. You know, like she saw the real me.

“Now, I feel different about all that. I mean, I don’t think there’s something of me to love separately from my circumstances. She needs to love me; who I am where I am, or not. That’s all. There’s no separate me.

“So what the hell, I believed her and I took her to my place. It was a room on the second floor. We climbed the stairs. I opened the door, and there it was, four hospital bed mattresses laid atop and beside each other, a pile of clothes, some white sheets and hospital blankets, a shelf of canned food and crackers and my weird shit. And there she was in her black slacks and gray designer shirt, with all of her oversized Tibetan jewelry. I hated her for a moment when she first walked in the door and was standing still, scanning the room, trying to hide her horror behind deceptively brave eyes that were trying to look happy and at ease.

“Rich people and poor people can’t really love each other.”

“You really think so?”

“I do now. I don’t know. Yeah. I didn’t know I was realizing it in that moment, but that was what I was realizing. I grabbed her and took her and kind of, really, forced her onto the pile of mattresses and blankets, cruelly calling her bluff. I didn’t give her much time to stand there and scan the room. Something mean was burning in me then. I was on top of her, pulling at her clothes, asking her, in a breathy hard voice, ‘You don’t care if I’m dirty? You love me still?

You don’t care how old I am? You want me? You still want me, don’t you.’ I was actually very much in control then, in my little, dirty, stolen room. I was whispering, ‘You still want me, don’t you,’ not as a question, but as a statement. I was telling her I knew she still wanted me, and the whole time, I was thinking, ‘You like slumming it, don’t you?’

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That’s what I was really telling her, ‘I know you’re getting off on slumming it with me, bitch.’ She was pulling on me while I was biting her neck and saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ but her eyes were open and she was looking sideways out of them, then closing them tight and pulling at me, and every part of her, her clean ass, and perfect manicured, waxed skin was quivering away from my dirty mattresses and old sheets, but I was on top of her, and the only direction for her to go when she pulled away from my dirt, was against me.

“She finally gave into it and relaxed, and I finally, when I was actually fucking her then, and afterward, didn’t hate her again.

She stayed for a couple hours in all. We were laying there after, her head was on my stomach, and she was just quietly tickling my thigh with her finger. ‘What else do you love?’ she asked, almost in a whisper, ‘I mean, besides me?’ She rolled on her back and looked around my room, at the metal shelves piled with canned food and the things I had collected.

“There were some scary statues of kind of goth kids, a taxidermy ferret, a bowl of teeth, just my weird art stuff. I said, ‘I love strange things.’ There was also a shelf of books. She asked if I liked to read. I said that I only read very selectively. ‘But yeah,’ I said, ‘If I read something, that’s because I love it.’ I told her, ‘I love Baudelaire.’

“She sat up then and kind of laughed, ‘You love Baudelaire?’ She said it like it was ironic, but she looked pleasantly surprised.

“I said, ‘Yeah, I love Baudelaire.’ “‘Do you have any here? Will you read me something?’

“I went and got a book off my shelf. I sat down next to her. We were sweaty and naked and I had an old, dusty book in my hands.

That was a good moment. I just opened it and started reading. I remember exactly where, cause I’ve looked at it over and over since then. It was a really beautiful poem. It said: . . . I will make O mortal maid, a Mantle for thy sake, Track Five: Private Dancer

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And weave it of my jealousy, a gown Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down With my distrust, and broider round the hem Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them.

And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be All the desires that rise and fall in me From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose, Kissing thy lovely body’s white and rose.

For thy humiliated feet divine . . .

“I stopped. She pointed at the line with her finger, ‘White as rose?’ she asked.

“I surprised her even more then. I explained how that started with Sappho. Where Sappho was, the roses were white. I told her she should know that because of her Greek ancestry. She laughed when I said that. Sappho often compared the moon to a rose and roses were white. I told her white roses are much more selfish than red roses.

“She lay there kissing me for a while before she left, looking at me like she just met me for the first time. She was very solemn and romantic about everything. So romantic, she didn’t pay me when she left. That was the first time she didn’t pay me. We didn’t talk about it; she just didn’t give me anything, which was fine. I mean, what I was doing with her wasn’t work anymore, and, at the time, I thought she stopped paying me because we’d both said, ‘I love you.’ But now, I wonder if it wasn’t because she’d seen how I was living; she’d seen how much I needed it. Like I said, if you let them, rich people know you need it, it makes them paranoid and they hold onto it as tight as possible. If they think you’re rich, then they give it to you abundantly. They all give money to each other like they’re trying to prove who needs it less. ‘Oh you don’t need money?

Well then, here, I don’t need it either, have some of mine.’ They’re very proud of themselves about it.”

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we ’ ve been driving for a good coupla hours. My legs is getting sore, so I tell Jules to move over and lay down beside me. I feel about like drifting off really, but I see I’m gonna be up a while. I push her on over to the side. “Jules hunny,” I say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t get it. You talking about this lady like you hate her, and I can pretty much see why, but you started off telling me you love her.

I mean, why do you love her then? If you think we can’t love rich folks, why you tryin to love a rich lady?”

Jules scoots on over and takes in my question real good. She’s sucking on the ring in her lip a lot and squinting up her eyebrows like she’s thinking about it real hard. She come back with an answer I seen on greeting cards. “Mya,” she says, “you can’t choose who you love.”

I laugh and shake my head. “Yeah, and every day’s a gift,” I say, “and wish you was here, and God never gives us more than we can handle.”

“Stop it.” Jules takes my head and kisses it. “Look. I thought I hated you, but now I think you’re brilliant. You’re hypnotic.

All I want to do when I see you, I just want to smell you and hold you. And last month, all I wanted to do was smack you.

But now, I can’t get enough. You think I chose that?” She put her hand in my shirt and starts petting my belly while she’s sniffing in my hair.

“That’s right, I guess,” I say. “Maybe you can’t choose who ya love, but sure as hell you can choose who yer with.”

“Oh, really? So what about you and Helen? Did you choose to love Helen, or did you choose to be with her? Or neither?”

Jules is a smart one there. She’s a real smarty-pants. A real smartass really.

“Helen help me out a lot,” I say. “She shown me nothing but love and kindness and I owe her a lot.” But I feel bad after I say that, like something smack me suddenly that I didn’t want to be looking at. I guess I wasn’t looking, and so it smacked me right in the face when I walked dab into it.

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Jules smiles and nods like she won something. “I love Delia, I do.

But beyond that, I need her, I depend on her. Maybe you’re right.

If it was just love, maybe I would be strong and not be with her at all, but maybe not. I can’t say for sure. She’s got some kind of hold on me. But I need her too. Just face it; you and I both have sugar mommas. We better at least try to enjoy it while we’re young and have the option.”

“What are you talking about, sugar mommas? God knows Helen aint rich, and you said yerself, Delia stopped paying you.”

“I said that was the first time she didn’t pay me. I didn’t say that was the last time she paid me.”

“She pay you now? Why’d she started paying you again?”

“Why else? Jealousy.”

“Jealous? Of who?”

“It was a few weeks after she came to my place the first time.

Like I said, sometimes women wanted to meet me first. And most of the women I met, I met while their husbands were at work, in the afternoons. I really couldn’t believe how they would just sit with me out in public like that. I asked some of them, though, ‘What if someone you know sees us together?’ One of them said she’d just say she was interviewing for a handyman. Another told me that if anyone came up, I should say I was applying for an internship at her business. Anyway, I was meeting one of these women. She was a blonde in her late thirties, very domestic, but seemed like maybe she used to be a party girl. She kept saying she’d always been ‘bicurious.’ She said ‘bi-curious’ a lot and whispered when she said it.

She said she’d always had been bi-curious, but was afraid to tell her husband. I told her that he actually probably wouldn’t mind, but she said he was a very serious Christian and he would mind. Still.

“So I’m sitting there, in a backyard garden of this nice restaurant in the Central West End, having a beer with her at two in the afternoon, and she’s leaning in and whispering ‘bi-curious,’ blushing and laughing, and here comes Delia, sitting down at a table on the other end of the patio with a group of women, her friends.

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They all looked like power wives. While she’s pulling her chair out, she sees me. She looked like she was going to die. Her mouth went open, her jaw literally dropped. She looked like someone had punched her in the stomach. She just stood there staring at me with this shocked look while the other women seated themselves around the table. I leaned away from the bi-curious woman and was just staring back at her. All her friends were sitting down, and she was just standing there, looking shocked at me. Then she looked at the woman I was sitting with, who was still babbling at me, not noticing anything. Delia was like four tables away. I remember her friend even pulled on her arm, and Delia brushed her away, then her look changed. She didn’t look like someone punched her in the stomach anymore; she looked like she was going to kill somebody.

She laid her hands flat on the table in front of her and leaned in with this deadly expression on her face, like my mom used to give me when she caught me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing and was demanding that I stop immediately.

“She was just standing there, glaring at me, leaning in, with her hands on the table while the waiters passed out sweaty bottles of water and French rolls to her friends. It was like she just forgot who and where she was. I was squirming in my seat under her glare.

I took a sip of my beer and nodded at what my date was saying, then looked back. She was still giving me the Medusa gaze. It was pretty noticeable. One of the women sitting across the table from her turned full around in her chair and tried to find where she was looking. The woman actually met my eyes for a split second before I turned away. When I looked again, Delia was taking her seat and talking to her friends, I guess making up some lie about being overheated or how she thought she saw someone she knew or something.

“I was totally rattled. I wanted to get out of there. I said something really weird to my date. I interrupted her and said the weirdest thing. I said, ‘Well, they say curiosity kills the cat, but I fucking hate cats, so lets pound this pussy.’ Then I downed my beer Track Five: Private Dancer

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and stood up. The girl actually swooned. She went, ‘Ohhhh,’ and twirled her blonde hair around her finger, then stood and followed me out of the restaurant, looking kind of hypnotized. When I was walking out, I glanced at Delia. She raised her brow at me and nodded ominously, then turned and resumed talking to her friends.

“I knew it was coming. All that night, I knew it was coming. She called around nine. She was kind of whispering and screaming at the same time. She said, ‘Jules, I do not appreciate being made a fool of !’

“I said, ‘Why are you whispering? Is James home? Are you afraid he’ll hear you?’ “‘That’s none of your goddamned business! You think this is funny? You like torturing me?’ “‘I didn’t know you were going to be there!’ I yelled. ‘This is a small city. Besides, if it’s none of my business about James, then it’s none of your business what I do either, Delia.’

“She got quiet for a minute, and then I could hear her crying, or trying not to cry. ‘It’s different when it’s right in your face,’ she said, and I remembered her husband with his fancy suit and his cock in his hands, watching her make me come. ‘God, I feel like a kid with you. You make me crazy in a way I didn’t even know I could be anymore. Jules, just meet me. I can’t live this way. I need to see you.

I need to . . . I don’t know what I need . . . Will you just meet me?’ “‘When?’ “‘Now.’ “‘I’m far away, I’m . . . I’m home.’ I lied. “‘Fine then,’ she said, screaming out loud now, ‘I’ll come to the goddamned hospital!’ “‘No. No. It’s fine. Meet me at Tower Grove Park in fifteen minutes, under the gazebo.’ “‘How are you going to get there in fifteen minutes if you’re at the hospital?’

“We both paused. ‘Are you at the hospital?’ She was still yelling loud. I heard something in the background, then a man’s voice; 154

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James said something and Delia was quiet. Then I heard Delia say, sweetly, ‘Lilly twisted her ankle. I’m telling her it’s nothing but she wants to go to the hospital. I guess I have to drive her.’

“I heard James say, ‘I thought you said she was already at the hospital.’

“Delia said, into the phone, ‘Lilly, you’re not at the hospital, are you?’

“I said, ‘This is really fucked up.’ “‘I agree,’ Delia said, her voice surprisingly steady and in charge. ‘So all right, yes, it is best if we go. That’s fine then. It shouldn’t take us more than ten or fifteen minutes.’

“She waited to see if I understood. ‘Fine. The gazebo in fifteen minutes,’ I said, and hung up.

“It was such a gorgeous night, just at the edge of summer, and the dark had come, but everything still seemed to glow with an almost bluish hue, and the leaves of the trees were making the most rich, gorgeous noises. The gazebo looked like something ancient and precious touched by the distant lamplight, and everything smelled like life. It would have made me feel really serene any other time. It was really horrible that I couldn’t enjoy what a nice night it was because of all the shit she was dumping on me. It would have even been nice just to be there with her, under other circumstances. I felt like she’d started a storm inside me, and the perfect weather outside of me almost made it worse by comparison.

“I stood there and waited under the roof of the gazebo, preparing myself. I saw her walking up through the trees. Her arms were folded and she was coming fast with definite steps. She was wearing the same sand-colored dress as earlier in the day, with a black scarf around her shoulders now. We didn’t say anything until she was up there with me. She stood in front of me with her chin pointed out, very dignified. She said, like she was my wife and she’d caught me, ‘Who was that woman you were with today?’

“I leaned back on the rail. I was really very sad more than anything. I told her, ‘Someday James is going to ask you the same Track Five: Private Dancer

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question.’ She let her arms fall to her sides and all the air seemed to go out of her. “‘I know,’ she said, ‘I must look ridiculous to you right now.’ She stood next to me and leaned on the rail. I saw that she was genuinely hurt. I went behind her and put my arms around her. ‘I just didn’t need to see it. That’s all.’

“I told her, ‘I had no way to know you were going to be there, Delia. You know what I do for a living.’

“She turned to face me. ‘But you’re so young,’ she said. ‘You have your whole life ahead of you. You’re passionate and intelligent. You should do something meaningful, something that gives you real pleasure.’

“I laughed then. ‘This isn’t so bad for that.’ But it wasn’t the time to make a joke. Her face dropped and she held me away. I saw her age when her eyes got serious and demanding, and demeaning like that. “‘Well, if you don’t care, why should I?’ Her voice sounded more like a woman’s than it usually had with me. I think she had been pretending she was young again with me. ‘If you don’t want to have pride in yourself, why should I want you to have it?’

“I took my hands off her then and stepped back. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘you bought me, remember? Actually, your husband bought me, so he could jack off while he watched me fuck you. And you were more than happy to do it. Where the hell are you finding high moral ground to stand on?’

“We were screaming then, and the beautiful breeze was carrying our distress to a height where nothing mattered. ‘I bought you all right!’ she screamed, her voice deepening and steady. That’s how you can tell if a woman was born rich or not. Women who were born rich, when they get mad, their voices get high pitched and crazy, like children. Women who weren’t, their voices deepen. “‘I bought you, and, boy, did you let me!’

“Then I was going crazy too. ‘I fuck for money!’ I yelled. ‘That’s how you met me. You know who I am. I’m not the one in love with a whore, you are, and you can’t handle it.’

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“‘Yeah, I bought you,’ she kept on. ‘I’m not just a patron, I’m a goddamned investor!’ “‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

“She picked at the shoulder of my shirt roughly, ‘I bought you the shirt on your back, as a gift.’ Her voice quivered, ‘It was a lover’s gift! And you wore it today, with that girl. You think you won’t get more action if you look better, Jules?’ Then her voice did go high and crazy, and her eyes were throwing a tantrum in her head. ‘Jules, tell me, is that what you think!’ She was screaming and balling her hands by her head. It scared me. I’d never seen an adult throw a tantrum. ‘I didn’t intend to be your business partner!’ “‘This shirt?’ I asked. ‘This fucking shirt? A lover’s gift?’ I unbuttoned it, tore it off and flung it at her. It hit her chest then fell to the floor of the gazebo. I was standing there half naked, feeling the air against my chest, wanting to hit her more than I’ve ever wanted to hit a woman who wasn’t my mother. ‘That fucking shirt?’ I got in her face, ‘Big fucking deal. A lover’s gift? Fuck you.’ I told her, sticking my finger in her face. ‘You think it matters what I’m wearing.

You think that changes how much I get paid or if they come back?

They’re not buying my clothes, you bitch, they’re buying me like this.’ I grabbed her hands and forced them to my chest. ‘You know what they’re buying: this. You too. You paid good money for these.’

“She tried to pull away, but I kept hold of her wrists.

“She screamed in my face so that I could feel her spit on my cheeks. ‘Did you like fucking her today? Are you proud of yourself ?’

“I replied, ‘Yeah. I did pretty good work today. I am proud of myself.’ Then I pushed her back and let her hands go. I turned and started walking down the stairs. “‘You can’t just walk around naked!’ she screamed, like she was really losing her mind. “‘Why not?’ I hollered back. ‘I go to work naked.’ “‘You think this is funny? You think this is fun for me? Oh God, oh God.’ She started sobbing and dropped to her knees. I watched her wallowing on the ground. She picked up the shirt and buried her Track Five: Private Dancer

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face in it. In a few minutes, her sobbing calmed to a quiet crying and she was patting her face and shaking her head. ‘What am I turning into?’ Her voice was calm and low, she was almost whispering, ‘This isn’t who I am. This isn’t me. What are you doing to me? Look at me, I’m pathetic. I’m going crazy. This isn’t me. I’m not this person.’

“I came back up the steps slowly, like I was approaching a sick animal. I got down on my knees next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘I know you’re not,’ I told her. ‘Calm down.’

“She turned her head up to me, all wet and puffed and red. ‘Is she, is she like me to you?’ she asked. “‘Who?’ “‘That woman you were with today. Do you tell her you love her?’

“I shook my head. ‘No, Delia. I just met her today. She’s a client. It’s just sex. Usually, they don’t even touch me.’

“She shook her head and buried her face in my neck, hugging me tight. ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what you do. Just, just tell me you aren’t saying you love me for the money. I mean, tell me the truth, I can take it.’

“At that moment, though, I don’t think she could have taken anything. She could barely take the truth, which was that I actually loved her.

“She put my torn shirt back on me and we walked slowly around the dark park, feeling the weight of everything we’d laid on each other leave us slowly, but the ache from carrying it was still there.

We couldn’t get rid of it that night.

“Weeks went by. Sometimes she came to the hospital. Sometimes we met in motels. A distance had grown between us, and she couldn’t let it go. She didn’t want me sleeping with other women, at least, not lots of other women, not for money. Some of them might have even been women from her circle of friends. She asked me how much I needed to live. The figure I came up with was astonishingly small to her. She told me she would ‘help me’ for a while, help me get on my feet; that I deserved it, that I owed it to 158

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myself and to her. She said she could pay me the figure I had given her. She said that it would free up time for me to find a real place to live and find another way to make money. But, honestly, it was a relief. I hadn’t planned on doing that for the rest of my life. I hadn’t planned anything. So, I said yes. She was happy. She even took me out to some weird little clandestine jazz club to celebrate. About a month later, I met Christie through a friend, and she said that there was a room open and I could live and work at the Catholic Worker’s house and pay what I could. Of course, Delia has never met me at the house. She doesn’t like to be around people either of us know. But now, I’ve got my little allowance coming in from her, and I’m starting to make some money doing fire dancing shows at the theater and for private parties. I also play the accordion and sing, so I get weddings and fancy stuff too.

“Delia still puts me through hell sometimes. I never quite know what will set her off. But then, sometimes we go for weeks and everything is perfect.”

“You gonna tell her about me?” Jules don’t say anything to that.

She just looks sideways and sighs, like she can’t believe I’m asking.

“Oh,” I say, “but I know all bout her now?”

Jules looks me in the eyes like I’m dumb or something. “That’s because I trust you,” she tells me. “I can tell you what I need to tell you because I trust you, because you’re not an evil, castrating bitch. Are you?”

Something in that almost seems like a threat in that compliment she gives me, like she’s twisting something around in my brain. But I can’t untwist it though. I just shake my head and try to take it as a compliment. “No. I’m not. I’m glad you trust me.” Oh I was a young one then. “But I don’t know why you’re wanting to stay with someone you don’t trust.”

Jules lays back with one arm behind her head and pulled me down with the other and kisses me. “You’re with Helen too, and I’m with Delia. I don’t want us to make each other choose. I don’t want us to be jealous. Please don’t pressure me to leave her.”

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“I aint jealous,” I say. “I’m not trying to get you to leave her,” I say. And right then is the first time I ever feel like an un-honest person. The first time I fall in love is the first time ever I’m feeling not honest, like I’m lying in a way that even I don’t understand how I’m lying, or just what I’m lying about. Cause it aint a lie like the exact opposite of the truth. I aint really jealous, but I aint happy about it either. It’s some kind of a lie that lives over to the side of the truth. It’s a love lie. Love makes honesty more complicated than just saying what’s real. Cause when yer in love, there’s lots of layers to real, to true, to lyin.

“Do you think her husband knows?”

Jules sighs big and looks at the stars. “Either he does, and he’s just pretending not to, because rich people, that’s how they deal with things, they just pretend it isn’t happening. Or he doesn’t have a clue, and if he does find out, he’s gonna feel like he’s been caught naked in school, like those dreams everybody has, but he’s gonna realize it’s not a dream, and he’s gonna blow.”

“I never had no dream like that.”

“Don’t you have, like, one bad dream that repeats, and if it was real, it would be devastating?”

“I dream a lot that a tiger’s eating my momma. But that was real.”

“Oh.” We laid there quiet for a while then, just watching the stars pass out the window, my head on her chest, listening to her breathe in and out and the sound of her heart beating. Jules shows me Cassiopeia and the Dipper, and says that thing about Orion again. I guess she knows them all. Then Jules asking me if I want to play a name game to pass the time. We play the name game. I’m no good at it cause I don’t know many famous folks, and so on my third turn of thinking too hard and long, I go and nod off. Then it’s hours later and Christie’s poking us in the side and it’s about four in the morning I reckon, and we done made it back to the house.

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i stumble out of the van all warm from cuddling on Jules, and she’s stumbling out in front of me. I’m rubbing my eyes, and squinting through the darkness. There alongside the driveway, up on the side of the road, is that big old truck. Helen’s diesel truck just sitting there big as anything. Jules is unloading her things outta the van. Me and Christie go get Aryan out of the trailer and take her on back to the barn, comb her down, and give her some feed.

The early morning is dark as late night, but I know the sun’s about to be poking through. I open the door and go into the kitchen. The orange lamp is on. Christie tells me she thinks Helen’s up in my room. She smiles her sleepy smile at me and pours us some milk. We gulp it down. She gives me a hug and tells me good night. I follow her up the stairs and she goes on into her room. The door to mine is closed, and there at the end of the hall, Jules’s door is open and her light is on. I creep up to my door and push it open real quiet. I hear it comin at me through the darkness, Helen’s snoring. It sounds like a sea monster, swelling and creaking and settling on down again, over and over to a heartbeat rhythm. I see the lump shadow of her there on my dark bed. I just lean against the doorway, folding my arms and looking at her, and feeling what she means to me. She remind me a lot of people from back home.

Even though she’s from Russia and travels all around, she’s still pretty country, I know, and I can’t say she never shot a man for me. She’s not like Jules at all. She loves me more than I love her and she’d do about anything for me and has. I do love her some way. But I also got a feeling in me like I owe her something. Even though it’s a good feeling having had someone do enough for you to be owing, it’s also a bad feeling to be owing, like I’m not sure if all the love I have for her is there because I really have it all, or if some of it’s cause I’m obliged to be having it.

I hear a creaking down the way and turn and look. Jules standing at her door, at the end of the hall like she’s waiting, looking at me like she’s wondering. I’m stepping back and looking at Jules. She say before that she don’t want us to be choosing. But there’s always

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some kind of choice, aint there? Yeah. There’s always a choosing to be done. I don’t got no obligation to Jules, but something in me, it’s pulling harder to go be with her than it’s pulling right then for me to go lay next to Helen and her solid snoring shadow. Helen knows I got growing to do. She says it a lot. I’m a young one then.

Just barely seventeen then. Jules and Christie don’t know how old I am. Helen knows though. She knows I’m a young one.

I step back and close the door real quiet. Helen’s snoring disappears. I tiptoe down the hall, and Jules smiled when she seen me coming. She let me in and closed the door behind me. jules got strange designs painted all over the walls, and things piled on the floor, statues and photos and bones and stuff all up on the shelf, dolls looking scary. I see what she means by she like weird things. She turns off the big light and turns on one and go lay down on her bed, which is still just a mattress on the floor. “Are you tired?” she asks.

I tell her I got some sleep in the van, but yeah, I could go down soon. She pats the spot on the bed next to her for me to lay down, but I’m still poking around her weird things. There on the floor next to her desk is a serious-looking metal box with all kindsa wires coming out of it, and next to it are some bottles of liquid, a bag of fertilizer, and what looks like parts of an old alarm clock. At first I think she’s in here making radios. Then something clicks in me, and though I don’t know nothing about that stuff, I think that thing there looks like a bomb, like one of those old cartoon bombs. I bend down to get a better look, and Jules sits up in her bed. “What’s this thing here?” I ask.

“It’s for a computer,” she says. “Leave that alone. Come here.”

She’s sitting up patting the side of her bed.

“What part of the computer is that?” I ask.

“Umm, it’s for the modem. What do you care? Come here.”

Like I say, I don’t know nothing about that stuff, computers or anything like that one way or another. It still feels fishy to me, but I

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shrug it off and I go lay down next to her. She switches off the light and pulls the covers up around us. “Are you going to sleep in your clothes?” she asks me, giggling. Then she’s pulling them off me, gentle. “I’m still not afraid to put my hand in it,” she says, kissing me sweetly on the neck.

I guess we the kindsa people who are putting our hands in things most wouldn’t. I tell her, “I see, yer not afraid.” She slips it down between my legs. I’m moaning and wanting to tear slow. “I can put my hand in it too,” I tell her. “But I think we should wear thick gloves. I think both of us are gonna get burned. Oh, hunny, it’s already burning.”

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track six

Name

to name a thing is to own it. Her mother had claimed ultimate ownership in giving her a name that only the two of them could really pronounce correctly, in giving her a name that could never be known to the world. But, she thought, in a way, her mother had also relinquished any equity in that ownership, as her lineage had to be forsaken for practical purposes, and could not be openly circulated in the economy of names. So it was a private bond between them.

Every time she spoke her real name, uttered the syllables of that tribal artifice she was so dubbed, it was as if she was conjuring her mother’s congenital poverty, holding it up as a dare, a bizarre totem, in the faces of beholders, those who could look but never touch, never quite reconstruct the icon manifest of a heritage of lack, of un-ownership, of complete dismissal of membership in a society built on the distribution of reproduction, of easily circulated, tangible commodities. And yet it was also a proclamation of ownership of the most profound elitism, so it was, in a way, a wealth. When she spoke her name, it was simultaneously a proclamation of enslavement and of freedom; the freedom to be un-owned by society, and yet the freedom to own nothing of value to this society, which is a segregation, which is to be enslaved within one’s identity.

“ mya . mine .” She repeated the new name to herself, trying to learn it as her own while she viewed the morning sun from the window. In Russian, it means mine, she thought. Who would name 164

a child mine? Who would name a lover mine? Big ole bull dyke, that’s who. Big ole bull dyke think my monkey an ole farm plot and she a highfalutin prospector coming to buy it up.

Mya turned from the window and looked to the bed where Jules lay sleeping. “She think she gonna buy a big farmhouse and I’ll fall right in there like a piece of furniture just cause she say so.”

Jules stretched and moaned from the bed, attempting to open her eyes. “What? Are you talking?”

“Helen call this morning talking about she got a place I’m supposed to go live with her.”

Jules rose like a bear awaking from hibernation. She gave her neck a scratch and clumsily pulled on her pants. They stood bathed in the late morning sunlight breaking through the window of the bedroom, Jules now in a white T-shirt and jeans, her brown Mohawk hanging softly to the side like a mane, Mya wearing her small, black tutu, her hair also black, still, a shocked bush adorning her head.

“Baby, I’m hungry,” Jules said, giving the air a sniff. “Is Christie making breakfast?”

“You hear what I say?”

“I heard you, baby.” Jules tried to kiss Mya on the forehead, but Mya shoved her away, perturbed. “Aw, come on. I just woke up.

What’s the problem? Just tell her no.”

“You try telling a Russian no. You ever tell a Russian no?”

Jules waved her off and headed out the bedroom door. jules had showered and was standing at the window watching Mya and Christie in the backyard returning from the run with Aryan. Six months, they’d been lovers, and Mya was becoming a part of her daily routine. She never meant it to be this way. Two lovers, one of whom could not claim her and the other she couldn’t believe she was claiming. Two lovers wasn’t an issue. Mya had Helen. She had Delia. She had Delia once a week and Mya had Helen one week a month, and besides that, they had each other.

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Mya was the issue. The not knowing how to claim her. The wondering how long it would last, the longing for her and wondering if she wanted it to last. It got under her skin knowing Delia was the kind of woman she wanted to be able to claim, but Delia felt even more ambivalent about her than she felt about Mya. She knew this cold fact, but never could turn and fully face it. She never could say it out loud. Here she was, standing at the window, watching the insane roommate who’d somehow become her lover of many months return her strange beast to the backyard of her home.

Her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, so she let it go to voicemail. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message, but a few beats after her cell phone quit ringing, the house phone began chiming in the hallway. She wrapped her towel around her wet hair and went to answer it. The phone shook slightly as it rang on the dusty wooden side table near the stairway. There was, she thought, an ominous tone to its sound. She picked up the plastic yellow receiver. “Hello?”

A man’s voice came from the other end, his tone calm and professional. “Hello. May I please speak with Juliana Mehra?”

“Who is this?” She was shocked to hear her full name. Her head swam with confusion.

“Oh. Hello, Ms. Mehra,” the man continued. “Yes, I recognize your voice. It saddens me that you don’t recognize mine. I suppose I did not have as lasting an impression on you as you’ve had on me, and other members of my family.” Her confusion cleared, making way for the obvious. Jules swallowed hard. The receiver trembled in her hand. She held her silence. “Ms. Mehra, I may not be skilled in social graces, as my wife so often points out. Nonetheless, I am not a man who abides public humiliation.” He waited for a response. There was none. “Do you understand me?”

“How did you get this number?”

A short laugh punctuated the receiver. “There are very few things in this world, even fewer in this little city, that I can’t get ahold of. I realize it might be difficult for a person of your . . .

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stature to grasp. Juliana, I am sitting here with your entire life folded neatly in a binder in front of me. It’s not very impressive.

I expected more, from Delia at least. But yes, I have your phone number. I have your address. I also have copy of the lease on the house of the said address as well as a list of code violations for that particular address for the last fifteen years. These things, which are so trivial to me, might not be so trivial to you.”

Jules rolled her eyes and switched the receiver from one hand to another. This is like a 1940s drama, she thought; she pictured James Michigan leaning back, seated in a large black leather chair behind a mahogany table in the center of a dimly lit conference room, cigar smoke trailing from his breath.

“It took you long enough to notice your wife’s fallen in love with someone else,” Jules said.

“Is that what you think?” James laughed. “I might be intimidated if I thought Delia was capable of falling in love with anyone at this point. I know my wife much better than you, Ms. Mehra.”

He added an affected accent to her last name. “She is a stunning woman. But she takes what she wants as long as it’s good for her.

She’s a survivor and a climber. That is one of the things I love about her. But you might find my idea of love is not so sentimental.” He cleared his throat. “Now I am telling you in no uncertain terms to stay away from my wife. I’ve already spent much more on you than was our original agreement. You won’t be receiving an allowance from me anymore.” His voice raised to a trembling boom. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you have been doing anything other than living off my back, my blood and sweat. Honestly, I don’t know how you hold your head up with any dignity. ” “Dignity?” Jules interrupted. “You’re one to talk about dignity.

You hired me! Whose idea was it, yours or hers? I can see why she wanted something else. I saw that mini-pistol you’re packing, you fuck. When I make her come, she screams like the world is ending.

And don’t think I have any problem taking your money. You’re destroying the earth. You deserve what you get!”

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There was a long silence. His stunted breathing was coming through the receiver. She thought about slamming it down, but something in her held on. “You have your entire life ahead of you to enjoy, if you choose. But if you reach out for what’s mine again, I will cut off the hand of the thief, Ms. Mehra. It’s over.” There was a click and a dial tone.

Jules slowly replaced the phone to the receiver. She leaned against the wall, unrolled the towel, and shook her damp hair. Her stomach tightened. She grabbed it in one hand and tried to swallow her nausea. Delia, she thought, would have to be the one to make the decision, not him. Her head felt like it was full of Styrofoam.

When she tried to picture Delia choosing her, she couldn’t get a clear image of it. What would Delia do? Come out as a lesbian?

Start bringing her to social gatherings with her friends? Introduce her family to the twenty-two-year-old runaway she’d been shacking up with for nearly two years?

Jules was in love. It was not only love that attached her to Delia, though. Delia loving her had given her a feeling of hope in herself, a feeling of value. Without Delia, she was just another hotheaded runaway queer, an uneducated, violent gypsy. She was everything her parents had always said she would be, a worthless piece of trash who would never add up to anything. A delusional child who refused to look the world in the eye would therefore never be self-sufficient.

When Delia was loving her, when someone so powerful and so successful was taking care of her, depended on her as well, needed her, she knew they’d all been wrong. She knew she was worth something.

Jules went into the bedroom and called Delia from her cell phone. It rang for several seconds, then went to voicemail. She dialed two more times. Still no answer. On the third time she left a halting message. She felt the need to cry swelling up in her. in the kitchen , Christie was cooking breakfast, while Chris sat

at the table sipping her coffee. Chris was a serious one and a homebody. Christie’s counterpart, they matched each other’s thinness 168

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pound for pound, and their bushy, dishwater brown hair seemed to have been plucked from the same patch. Mya thought of Chris as Christie’s double, but with glasses.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Chris asked Christie.

“Anything left for us?” Jules fell hard into a seat at the table.

“Plenty. I don’t eat breakfast, so I guess she’s cooking for you.”

Chris jotted something down in the black notebook in front of her.

Mya took two plates down from the shelf. She stopped at the kitchen window and watched Jeff and Stanley, their two skinny male roommates hoeing in the garden in short shorts. “Look at those fags ho-ing it up in the garden,” Mya said playfully, pointing. She slid the window open and hollered out, “Pansies in the pansies!” then cackled.

“You old queen!” Stanley hollered back at her and waved, chuckling as well.

“Your names Adam and Steve?” Mya hollered back.

Christie tugged her shoulder. “I don’t know how you get away with talking to them that way. Leave those boys alone and sit down.”

Mya placed a plate in front of Jules and took a seat at the table.

The sun was shining through the window in a blanket of wealth.

Christie flipped two eggs in the pan. “I can’t believe summer is already knocking on the door. This winter passed so quickly.”

“I thought it would never end,” Jules said.

Chris did not look up from her notebook. She sipped her coffee loud and grunted, “Well, I guess your winter was longer and harder than ours.” Her tone was cold, accusatory. “If you ask me, you two made it longer and colder than it had to be. Ours went fast enough. I only hope you don’t make the heat of summer so intolerable.”

Christie plopped two eggs down on Jules’s plate. Jules tucked her head down, tensed her shoulders and gave no answer.

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her nose and turned a page in her notebook. “I’m sorry you were interrupted,” Christie told her. “Now that she’s done gay-bashing everybody, you can go on. I’m listening.”

Chris placed her head in her hands as if she was finishing some exhausting activity. “I was just saying,” she told Christie, “when thinking about the nature of phallocratic order, we always speak of the Western and specifically American social structure, and especially when we’re speaking of the military-industrial complex, as a phallocratic system. Yet American conscientiousness and its relation to military action does not follow a logical, linear pattern. If anything, it is circular, possibly dysphoric, definitely hysterical; for instance, it invades Iraq while openly proclaiming the reason for this is that America was attacked by Afghanistan.”

Christie nodded thoughtfully. Frustration touched her face. She shook her head no and leaned into her lover’s leaning. “But a phallocratic structure is also cylindrical,” Christie said. She nodded into her partner’s eyes to make sure she was listening. “And when you speak of phallocratic consciousness, you can’t assume that it contains a conscientiousness, linear or otherwise. The phallocracy is not concerned with the experience of the other. It does not rationalize fairness into the equation of conquering. It is self-obsessed, concerned only with claiming and controlling its territory, rationalizing defense against any possible threat to its control. So phallologic is only concerned with logic in so much as logic perpetuates its continued control, its continued power.”

She turned back to the stove and broke two more eggs over the pan. Some remnants of translucent yolk hung desperately to the shell, creating a line from the pan to the broken ivory panoply. She shook the goo off and tossed the shells aside. “You have to remember that the invasion of Iraq was successfully rationalized in the public sphere through the alleged attack by Afghanistan. Afghanistan was held up as an example of what would become of other non-Western-compliant theocracies if they were allowed to evolve without US intervention. The logical/phallological assumption 170

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was that inaction would culminate in an attack on American soil.

Therefore, preemption became acceptably integrated into the definition of defense.”

Mya scanned them warily from where she waited at the table.

“You two having an argument?” she asked.

“No darling,” Christie said, serving Mya the sizzling eggs, “we’re having a discussion.”

Jules waved a fork at them. “These two don’t have arguments; they have discussions,” she said, a note of irony in her tone.

“We’re not even having a discussion. We’re having a conversation,” Chris explained. Her plaid men’s work shirt smelled of hay and sawdust. Mya could make out the scent from across the table.

Christie sat down with them. “Oh, Mya, we already fed Aryan this morning, just so you know.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway, ladies,” Chris said, closing her notebook, “We’re screening the Weather Underground documentary at the theater tonight. I’m trying to relate their direct action methods with feminism; ‘Bring the War Home’ as a cry for empathy; giving birth to the destruction that we’ve exported, right in the living room.

Smearing the orphan placenta on the door, if you will.”

“I won’t!” Christie picked up the paper and shook her head.

“She’s been reading Lucy Irigaray again. She’s seeing everything through a genital lens,” she told Jules.

“Genital lens?” Mya laughed.

“Are you coming?” Chris asked them.

“I know that thing forward and backwards,” Jules said.

“What about you, Mya, are you coming?” Chris asked.

Mya smeared her eggs on her toast. She looked to Jules for an answer. “You saw it,” Jules told her, “remember? We watched it together. Maybe you should see it again.”

Christie folded her hands and leaned in, curiosity spreading across her face. “You saw it? And what was your opinion?”

Mya, again, looked to Jules. “Which one was that?” she asked.

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“The Weather Underground,” Jules said, perturbed. “You don’t remember? You should really watch it again.”

“Oh, about those people that blew up things because of Vietnam?”

Christie nodded. “That one. Right. So, Mya, what did you think?”

Mya downed her juice. “I like that scene where they all do it together in the back of the van.”

Chris coughed, spat her coffee into her cup, and wiggled around in her chair. Christie smiled patiently and kept her eyes on Mya. “Is that all? What did you think about the bombings?”

“Well,” Mya said, searching for words and looking again to Jules, then to Chris, “I guess at first they went too far, but then they back up, didn’t they? They was bombing buildings finally, not people, after one of their own got blown up, right?”

“Yes,” Christie answered, “they were going to bomb a police ball, and when one of them lost their lives making the bomb, they realized that the loss of human life was—like you said—going too far.”

“In that way,” Chris said, “the empathy that they were planning to force onto society was forced onto them, and they were, in turn, forced to have empathy for the unempathetic society; forced into a submissive position of empathy, which is, if you think about it, an inherently concave psychological composition.”

Christie patted Chris’s hand, quieting her. “So, what do you think, Mya? Is violence ever justified?”

Jules leaned in. “Yeah, what do you think, Mya?” Mya straightened her back and gave Jules a hard look. Squaring her chin, she said, too loudly, “I think those who’re thinking about doing that kinda thing better watch their asses. You can get in a lot of trouble over that kinda thing.”

“Yes,” Chris answered, “they gave up their freedom, and went underground. Into the cave.”

“What you risk reveals what you value,” Jules said, her eyes locked hard on Mya’s.

“Who said that, again?” Christie asked.

“Jeanette Winterson,” Chris answered.

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“Yeah, you got that shit on yer wall,” Mya hollered at Jules, standing and swiping her empty plate from the table. She stomped over to the sink and began washing her dish vigorously. “But I don’t get it,” she continued, her voice going up and down loudly, like an angry country song. “What does that mean? That mean if you risk your life, you value your life? Or does that mean if you risk your life, you don’t value it?”

“What’s wrong with her?” Chris asked Jules.

Jules folded her arms and shrugged defiantly. “Damned if I know.”

Chris leaned back in her chair and let out a long sigh. “Well I’m betting we’re probably all damned,” she said, cocking her head in disbelief at Jules. She tried to get Jules to look her in the eye, but Jules would not engage. Chris was one of the original founders of the house. Jules was starting to grate on her nerves. Although she’d happily accepted Jules as a resident, she was now sorely regretting her decision. Some of Jules’s actions over the last year, she knew, could endanger everything she’d worked so hard to build.

She didn’t understand how Christie could keep a smile on her face. That’s what allowed people to walk all over her, her smiling.

Damned if she was going to grit her teeth and smile along while some dumb kid, who didn’t take life seriously, wrecked everything.

Christie got up and went over to Mya, placing her hand gingerly on her shoulder. “You don’t have to agree with what they did,” she told her. “You don’t have to come tonight, hunny. We’re just talking.”

“What is today?” Jules asked.

“It’s the twelfth.”

“Oh shit,” Jules said, smacking her forehead with her hand, “we can’t come tonight anyway. We have a show. That Gypsy-themed Bat Mitzvah is tonight. Mya, we have to practice. Is your costume clean?”

Mya spun around from the sink. “What’d you say today was?”

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for the first time. “Well, my God,” she said. “I aint been paying enough attention. Tomorrow’s my birthday.” She folded her arms, leaned back and gave a nod, a look of pride coming to her face.

She smiled a big smile. “I’m officially legal tomorrow.”

“What?” Christie hugged her and kissed her cheek. “Well, happy birthday. Oh, I remember my twenty-first birthday—you know I’m not a drinker, but I was that night. Oh God, was I ever.”

“I didn’t know tomorrow was your birthday.” Jules said. “Wow. Well, it’s the best one. Yeah, all the bars give you free drinks. I’ll take you out.”

Mya shook her head. “No, I aint legal for drinking tomorrow.”

As she continued, with each word it was as if someone was sucking the air from the room, as well as the blood from the faces of the three women listening to her.

“I gonna be a legal citizen tomorrow, legal to vote, join the army, and all kinds of things, most of which I aint ever gonna do or already been doing, but I guess you know that. Don’t seem to matter if it’s legal or not anyway, so I don’t know what I’m really celebrating. Just living another year, I guess.” Mya turned casually and placed her dish in the rack as the weight of the news settled on Jules’s head.

“Rock’n fucking roll,” Chris said, tossing her hands in the air.

She leaned over the table and pointed a stiff finger into Jules’s face.

“You and me, outside, now.”

Jules smacked her hand away. “What the fuck does this have to do with me?” She looked at Mya. “You told me you were twenty.”

Mya shook her head. “Hmpmmm. I never told you no such thing.

You told me you’re how old you were. You’re twenty-two, now. I know when your birthday is and all, cause I asked you. You never asked me. I never told you. There are lots of things you never ask me.”

“This?” Chris said to Jules. “Really? You’re going to find a way to turn this into some kind of lesbian relationship drama too?”

“Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t do anything!” Jules hollered back.

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“Well, I can’t hold her responsible, can I? She’s not even an adult, apparently.”

There were lines around Christie’s eyes and a rigid crease in her forehead that ran down like a creek though a mountain. “Mya,” she asked, “does Helen know how old you are?”

Mya kept her eyes on Jules. “Yes,” she said proudly, “Helen knows how old I am. She asks me things like that cause she cares about me. She knows all about when my birthday is. Took me out to dinner an all last year, even.”

Christie grabbed Mya by the elbows. “So, when you met Helen, hunny, you were . . . sixteen?” Mya was startled by the intensity of the look Christie was giving her. She nodded yes, and leaned away from Christie’s firm, motherly grasp. Christie kept on, “But, hunny, she said that when she met you, you were . . . a sex worker?”

“I didn’t really work,” Mya said. “I just hold a pink parasol in a booth all day.”

“That’s great,” Chris told Christie. “We’ve been harboring a juvenile runaway with ties to the child sex industry. They’ll call this trafficking! You know how the city loves anarchist collectives full of communists and child sex slave runaways.” Christie wasn’t listening to her. She had forced Mya’s head into her bosom and was patting her back, comforting herself more than she was comforting Mya. Jules stood from her chair. “Just calm down,” she said. “She’s been here more than a year. No one’s looking for her. She needed a place to stay. You gave her a place to stay. You can probably claim her as a dependent on your back taxes, Chris. That ought to make you happy.”

“You don’t know that no one is looking for her,” Chris came back.

“What, you want to collect a reward?” Jules said.

Chris gave Jules a threatening look and turned her attention back to the two at the sink. “For God’s sake, Christie, didn’t Helen tell you how old Mya was? Didn’t you ask? Didn’t anyone ever ask?”

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was nineteen. I don’t know.” Christie held Mya’s face up to hers.

“Hunny, did Helen tell you to lie about your age?”

Mya grimaced and shook her head. “She said, don’t make a big deal about it. Now I see why. Y’all going crazy.”

“What Helen did,” Christie said, slowly, evenly, “is called statutory rape. It’s very serious—corrupting a minor. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Probably also transporting a juvenile across state lines, even kidnapping.” Chris said.

“Would you just calm down?” Jules said. “It’s not like anyone is prosecuting.”

Mya pulled herself away from Christie. “No one raped me,” she said emphatically.

“It doesn’t matter,” Chris told her. “That’s what they call it when you’re under eighteen.”

“Now y’all being what yer always talking about other people being. What’s that word you use? Age-ism! That’s what you’re being.”

“Oh, now she has a political theory,” Chris said, tossing her hands up in defeat.

“Fuck you!” Mya spit. “I know when I’m being made fun of.”

Chris took a step back, startled by Mya’s sudden burst of anger.

Christie stepped between them and smoothed Mya’s hair. “All right. Jules is right. We’re making too big of a deal out of this. We all need to calm down.” She turned to Chris. “Tomorrow is Mya’s birthday. That’s all. No one is turning anyone in for anything.”

She moved carefully to the stove and set a pot of tea to boil.

“I’m going to have some tea. Mya, you and I should take Aryan out for a run, then you’ll get ready for your show, and we’ll figure out what to do for your birthday. Maybe you should call your relatives tomorrow and let them know you’re okay.” She noted the look of horror on Mya’s face. “Or not. We’ll talk about it later, okay?

Later tonight or tomorrow morning. Just you and me.”

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at the front door and waited. Jules nodded at her. She went outside.

Jules walked over to Mya while Christie started boiling water for tea on the stove. Jules reached for Mya, but Mya stepped away.

“You never asked me how old I was,” she said, accusingly.

“That’s because I don’t care how old you are,” Jules replied.

“I’m not . . . age-ist.” A coy smile lighted on her lips.

“You just pull that outta yer back pocket?” Mya asked, her anger beginning to fade.

“I should have asked when your birthday was though. I’m sorry,” Jules said, reaching again for Mya. This time Mya let Jules get hold of her waist and pull her in. Christie let out a pained sigh and stirred the tea, looking worriedly out the window. “I’m sorry,” Jules continued. “Let me make it up to you. Let me take you out tomorrow.”

“Helen called again while you two were upstairs,” Christie said from the stove. “She told me to tell you to call her. She’s coming back tomorrow.” She wasn’t looking at the two of them.

Mya’s eyes lighted with anxiety. Jules took her chin in her hand.

“Don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine. We’ll deal with it,” she said, kissing Mya lightly on the lips. They stood bathed in the late morning sunlight that was breaking through the window, Jules in a white T-shirt and jeans, her brown Mohawk hanging softly to the side like a mane, Mya wearing her small, black dress, her hair also black, a shocked bush adorning her head. They stood locked in a gaze of cupidity, which shook them both with tenderness and anguish. “I have to go talk to Chris. I’ll meet you upstairs in an hour. We can practice for the show.”

Mya nodded yes. Jules kissed her once more, then turned and headed outside. the treetop shadows beside the house trembled in the anx-

ious light of early spring. Chris looked into the distance, pensive, but with anger sparking in her eyes. She held her silence. Jules approached and stood at a lean against the mild breeze, her hands in her pockets, watching Chris watch the distance.

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“What did you want to talk to me about?” she finally asked.

Chris didn’t look at her yet. “I’m tired, Jules. I’m worried about where you’re heading, and I’m tired of worrying.” She kicked her foot softly against the ground.

“No one asked you to worry about me.”

Chris turned to face her. “It’s not just about you. If you go down, we all go down.”

“Look, if this is about Mya being underage, that’s not my fault.

I didn’t even know. Now she’s eighteen. We’re in the green zone.”

“You know it’s not just about that. That’s just the icing. God knows it doesn’t help. It doesn’t bother you at all that you’ve been fucking a kid?”

“When you fucked me, I was twenty. What’s one or two years?”

“At that age, it’s a lot,” Chris told her. Jules plucked a leaf from the tree and pulled it apart. Chris pushed her head in to look Jules in the eye. “Why are you bringing that up? You have something you need to say about that? It was one time. I thought we were way past that.”

“We are. I’m just giving you an example.”

“An example? Of what?”

“Your hypocrisy.” Jules tossed the mangled leaf aside.

Chris let out a snake-like hissing laugh into the air and stepped back, shaking her head. “You’re living some kind of fucking Spanish soap opera lately! Not everything is about who fucked who and when and why.”

“Non-monogamy isn’t easy,” Jules retorted. “There’s no map for this.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Jules smiled meanly, “I don’t know. Seems like you’ve settled down, been domesticated. You’re becoming nuclear.”

“You’re so young. I can’t believe how young you are sometimes.”

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about that, because we don’t broadcast it from the loudspeakers like a bomb drill every day.” Christie pointed her finger in Jules’s face. “You’re doing some very dangerous shit. You think I don’t know? You need to cut it off with that rich bitch. She is making you too volatile. I know what you are cooking up up there. You think you’re being sly? Pretty soon everyone is going to know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not doing anything. If you want me to keep my personal life to myself, I can respect that. I can be more private.”

“That is not what I’m worried about. I’m worrying about the day the feds bust in here for your ass, and you do know what I’m talking about. I didn’t start this house to watch it get shut down by a dumb kid who doesn’t take life seriously.”

“You are paranoid. I haven’t been doing anything that would bring the feds,” Jules said, wavering. “You’re the one who’s always making speeches at rallies, and getting on the news chaining yourself to Boeing with all those hippies. You’re the one with the record, not me.”

Chris planted her feet firmly on the ground, squaring herself in front of Jules’s wavering frame. “That’s activism, Jules. That’s called activism, not terrorism. They can’t call what I do terrorism.

If you think they won’t paste your Paki mug on a most wanted poster and call you a terrorist quick as you can say Patriot Act, you’ve got another think coming. And if you think that spoiled cunt won’t turn on you as soon as she finds out what you’ve been doing, or what, God help me, I pray you’re not planning, well then, you don’t know the difference between shit and shoeshine.”

“Delia wouldn’t turn on me. She hates what her husband does as much as I do.”

“Oh yeah, and she hates his money as much as you hate taking it from her too.” Chris turned and began pacing a horseshoe pattern around Jules. “The only thing you can think about while I’m laying the truth on you is whether Delia would turn on you. Your head is further up your ass than I thought.”

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The sun seemed to jolt toward the center of the sky like the tick of a clock hand. Or maybe it was simply the effect of her mood, but Jules perceived the sudden, slight shift of the shadow’s slant on the yellow-green grass as Chris continued. “Has Delia ever asked you about the fire? Do you think she suspects?”

Jules raised her eyes to Chris’s face. She shivered, licked her suddenly dry lips, and shook her head no.

“That’s right,” Chris told her sternly, “I know about it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Luckily, the cops are dumb as doorknobs. The only thing I don’t know is how you got it to burn so well in the middle of that snow?” Jules began playing kick the nonexistent can with her feet, her shoulders up around her chin, hands in her pockets. “Was it just a ton of kerosene? You didn’t use your juggling torches, did you? Are you that dumb? Look at me.”

“What I do is activism too,” Jules mumbled to the ground.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Chris asked, forcefully, hand to her ear. “Did you say something?”

Jules snapped her head up to Chris, attempting a dignified stance. “I said, what I do is activism too. It’s called direct action.

Maybe you’ve heard of it. You act like you’re on some fucking theoretical high ground . . .”

“No,” Chris shouted, “I act like I have a fucking brain in my fucking head! You think you can burn down the construction site of the company owned by the husband of the woman you’re fucking, and no one is going to trace that back to you? To me? To all of us? We’ll be accomplices! Don’t you fucking get that?”

Jules held Chris back with her hand and met her anger evenly, “No one got hurt. It was just the skeleton of the plant. Just a construction site. No one was there. What would you have done? Start a canvass, get some petitions against it?”

“Yeah! That is what I would have done. You educate. You let the public know why you are against it. Make the public aware of their practices. There are farmers’ unions already active against them.

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educate the public as to why. But that’s not why you have a hard-on for Monsanto, is it?” Jules glared at her like a spiteful child. “You’ve got a hard-on for Monsanto because their executive is fucking your girl. You know why he’s fucking her? Cause he’s her fucking husband! You need to cut it off and move on with your life.”

Jules shook her head in disgust. “Fuck you, Chris. You don’t know anything about it. He’s not going to be her husband much longer, anyway.”

Chis grabbed Jules by the shoulders and shook her. “Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? You think she’s going to leave him for you? You think she’s going to leave him for her midlife crisis?” She bent to Jules and let her words smack as hard as they could. “You think Delia Michigan is going to leave her husband for the fire dancing homeless towel head she pays to fuck her on Sundays? Really?”

“What did you call me?” Jules asked, eyes flushed red with tears.

She pulled away and shoved Chris hard in the chest.

Chris expelled her breath like a popped balloon. “I’m not the one who thinks that about you, but if you think she doesn’t think that way every time she sneaks out with you, you need to hear it.”

“To hell with you,” Jules said. She spat on the ground between them and, stepping back, beginning to walk away.

“I’m not done,” Chris said, following her. “I’m sorry Jules, but I called you out here to tell you I’m going to have to ask to search your room.”

Jules stopped walking, looked into the distance and laughed.

“Well, I’m sorry, Chris, but I’m gonna have to say no.”

“You don’t have a choice. It’s either that, or get out. I’m coming tomorrow morning to look. If you have anything in there that shouldn’t be there, I suggest you get it out of the house immediately.”

Staggering like John Wayne, Jules stepped back up to Chris.

“You’re throwing a lot of serious words around today, boss. Either that or get out? Says who? It’s a collective, Chris. It’s not your choice.”

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“I can call a house meeting and bring my concerns, and I mean all of my concerns to the table, out in the open if you want. I can tell them what I think you have in your room and why I want to search it. I’m guessing Mya already knows, the way she was talking in there. But if I do that, then I don’t know who’s going to vote to keep you. I’m sure those boys don’t want to be worried with possibly being tried for terrorism.”

Jules pointed her chin to the sky and grinned maliciously. “Oh, isn’t that convenient? You don’t think that about me, sure. I’m the only one in the house who isn’t white, and now I’m a terrorist?”

“Don’t turn this into something it isn’t.”

“I’m not turning it into anything. It is what it is.” Jules turned away from her again, and began walking slowly toward the house.

“Mya loves you. I love you. None of us want to see you hurt, that’s all.”

“Fuck you,” Jules hollered.

“You’re already fucking me, and yourself. Get your brain out of your cunt and your head out of your ass,” Chris hollered back.

“And don’t try to play the race card with me. Play the juvenile delinquent card. That’ll work better for you.”

Jules spun abruptly around and headed back toward her, violence lighting on her brow. She walked up fast on Chris and Chris had to step back quickly to keep from being overrun. Jules’s hand found its way to her chest and was shoving her back with each step.

“Back—the fuck—off !” Jules told her, punctuating each word with a shove. “You think you’re my mommy? You think you’re my fucking prison guard?” Jules pushed her again with both hands now, hard. “I don’t answer to you, get it?”

On the last big shove, Chris grabbed Jules’s wrists and kicked her feet out from under her, sweeping her to the ground. Jules struggled against her and pulled her down as well, so they were both tumbling on the bright green lawn near the shady tree.

In an instant, the boys were running up in their neon hot-pants and soiled gardening shirts. “Oh my God!” Jeff yelled, “the dykes 182

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are killing each other!” They each grabbed Jules by an arm and tried to pull her away from Chris. Jules struggled against them, grabbing hold of Chris’s collar. Chris sat up and Jules fell back on her ass, still clinging to the collar of Chris’s shirt. The boys had also fallen beside her, still holding onto her arms.

“I’m coming tomorrow,” Chris told her defiantly.

Jules released her and she fell back. “Ladies, stop it!” one of the boys hollered.

“I can’t take much more of this,” the other said through winded breathing.

Jules relaxed and shook them off, standing and straightening herself. She looked Chris over. “You’re coming tomorrow? You and what army?” She laughed, ironically, then turned and made her way into the house. The boys helped Chris up with shaking hands.

“It must be that time of the month again,” one of them yelled to the sky. The other scanned Chris’s face for explanation. inside the house , Mya found Jules lying on her bed. She

hopped into the room and flopped down beside her. She tugged at Jules’s pillow and scratched her back gingerly. “What’s the matter ole hound dog, cryin all the time? Chris let into you good, huh?

She real sore about me being underage?”

Jules removed the pillow from her face, her eyes a wide shock of red. “No. I calmed her down. It’s fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” Mya came back.

Jules sat up and looked Mya over. She was lying on her back, staring up at her, smiling weirdly in a torn black lace tutu, grass in her hair, her eyes circled by rings of black liner. Mya made sense to her. She and Mya together made sense. Something in this thought comforted her, but something also made her feel terrified. If she made sense with a person like Mya, what kind of person was she?

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know you’re okay; let them wish you happy birthday? They can’t do anything to you now that you’re eighteen.”

Mya grimaced and wiggled in place. “Naw. Jeez, come on. You don’t even talk to your parents.”

“I call them once a year. Let them know I’m alive. The trick is just not letting them talk, you know. Who could you call?”

“I don’t know. I guess I got some uncles might want to be hearing from me. But I don’t got their numbers.”

“All you need is their name. You remember their names, don’t you?”

Mya stared blankly back. “I think yer switching up the subject.

What did you and Chris decide?”

Jules leaned on her side and stroked Mya’s hair. “Everything’s fine. We pretty much worked it out today. I just have to ask you a favor. I need to store something in your room for a few days. Can I do that?” Before Mya could answer, Jules leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

Mya smiled but held Jules’s head away. “What you gotta put in my room?”

“I just have to do some cleaning around here. I need some space, so, like, I need to store that box of books and maybe a couple of suitcases.”

“Like that black case you got in the closet?”

Jules removed Mya’s hand from her cheek and placed it to her chest. “Do you believe in me?” she asked.

Mya’s eyes slanted into two thin lines. “I got lotsa evidence you exist, yeah.”

“That’s not what I mean. You know what I mean. Are you on my side, or not?” She waited for Mya’s answer, but Mya was viewing her as a skeptic might a magician. Jules tried again. “I love you.

A big part of love is trust and support. I need you to trust me and be with me on this. Will you? Do you really love me?”

“You aint ever even told me right out what this is. So you aint really trusting me either, are you? You tell me right out what I’m helping you with, and then we’ll see.”

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Jules nodded. “Fine. We’ll talk about it tonight.” She patted Mya’s leg. “Come on, let’s get ready for the show.” johanna goldberg couldn ’ t have been happier with her

Gypsy-themed Bat Mitzvah party. The palm reader told her that Danny Schottle would be her boyfriend by the end of the year. All she had to do was ask. Sarah Linder, the girl at her party whom she most despised, but had still been obligated to invite, had tripped on her scarf during the circle dance and fallen so badly that her dress had gone up over her head, revealing her ridiculous bloomers, and everyone had laughed. Johanna’s parents hired the coolest accordion player anyone had ever seen: a dark, tough girl with a fierce punk Mohawk and piercings in her face. Johanna lied and told everyone that they were secretly good friends who smoked together sometimes after school, creating a mystique about herself she had always longed for. She made out better than she expected with gifts and cash. At the end, after the cake, everyone, oohed and aahed over the white horse in the backyard, a superb final touch, and all of the children were invited to ride in circles on the horse’s back while its weird trainer held the rope.

Yes, it had been a perfect night for her welcome into womanhood. As she bid her friends and relatives farewell, she was filled with a deep feeling of satisfaction, an energetic anticipation of her future. Everything was in clear and perfect order in her mind. She could not have been more certain of her own perfection, of her own happiness than she was that night. Her certainty and internal ordering were interrupted only slightly, only for a moment, by the unexpected and unnamable pang of emotion that came as she glimpsed, between hugs and kisses, the sight of the horse trainer in her black tutu and the fiercely cool accordion player mounting the white horse together, the strange, small woman in front, the accordion strapped over the player’s back, her arms wrapped around the waist of her . . . friend. As Johanna stood, at the door, dolled up in her small white dress, taking in the sight of them Track Six: Name

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riding slowly away down the tree-lined street of the gated Clayton Neighborhood, she couldn’t help but wonder what of the beauties of the world she would never know. Her grandmother took her gently by the chin and turned her around, pressing a small gold bracelet into her palm. The old woman smiled sweetly as she turned the band over in Johanna’s hand. On the back was etched her family’s name, Goldberg. “This has been with us for generations,” her grandmother told her, “and we’ve suffered to keep it.

Now it’s yours. You’ll give it to your daughter.” Her grandmother pulled her in to kiss her cheeks. Her mother placed a hand proudly on her shoulder, and Johanna forgot what it was she had just been thinking about. mya let jules off at the front door and headed to the backyard to put Aryan up for the night. Aryan snorted and shook her mane as they headed toward the makeshift barn. Mya hopped off and patted her head. “Don’t worry,” she told her, “you getting fed, even though you already had enough apples tonight to . . . feed a horse.

Ha! You gonna get fat.” She tugged Aryan along, but the horse stalled and snorted shaking its head. “What’s a matter, girl?” Mya asked, taking a look around. “Oh. Oh, well then.” Standing by the back door was a tall and fragile looking woman in a long dress, a fancy scarf draped over her shoulders. She seemed to be deliberating something. In the few moments Mya watched her, she’d stepped up to the door as if preparing to knock, then stepped back at least three times. She kept looking at a slip of paper, holding it up to the yard light. Finally, she noticed Mya and Aryan standing on the other side of the lawn. She leaned forward to get a better look. Her hand came up in a half wave, then she thought better of her move, tucked her hand into her scarf and began to walk quickly away. Mya followed after her, “Hey, hey, lady,” she said, “who goes there? Now where you goin? You got no reason to be scared.” Mya gained ground. “You a peeping Tom, peeping Jane?”

The woman stopped and turned as Mya approached. They stood

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at the side of the house, the yard lamp and moon lighting their faces. “You looking for something?” Mya asked.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said shaking her head. “I think I must have the wrong address.” To Mya, the woman’s eyes seemed to be simultaneously smiling, apologizing and threatening. “I think I must be looking for the house next door,” she said, pointing.

“Excuse me.” The woman began to back away but Mya interrupted her.

“I know this street pretty well. You got the address there written down? Don’t want you getting shot from poking around where you shouldn’t be.”

“Oh dear.” The woman viewed her with fixed trepidation. “No, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

“Let’s see where you’re trying to go,” Mya said, reaching for the paper.

“Is that,” the woman asked peeking over her shoulder, “a horse?”

“Oh yeah, that’s Aryan,” Mya said, taking the paper from her hand.

“Aryan,” the woman repeated slowly, nodding as Mya inspected the paper.

“Nope, looks like you got it right. This here the Catholic Worker’s house. But if yer looking for religious counselin, I gotta tell you, these aint those kinda Catholics.” Mya handed her the paper back.

The woman looked from the horse to Mya. “Is it legal to keep a horse in your backyard?” she asked, thinking out loud.

“You a cop or something?” Mya asked aggressively.

The woman shook her head no, as if in a daze. “What’s wrong with its eyes?”

“Hey,” Mya said, snapping her fingers in the air, “I said you got the right place. You lookin for someone in particular?”

“Oh? This is the right address?” She stepped back and looked the house up and down, then back to Mya. “What’s your name?” Mya asked.

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“I’m sorry. I’m being strange.” Her voice showed a slight tremor. “It’s been a long day. Forgive me. I’m Delia.” She reached out her hand to shake. “I’m looking for a woman named Jules. It’s about a job.”

Mya did not reach her hand out in return. Something in her stance crumpled, easy as aluminum paper smashing. “It’s late for a job interview, isn’t it?”

Delia smiled large, let out a charming laugh and touched Mya’s arm lightly with her hand. “Oh I know. I hope I’m not being rude.

I was just in the neighborhood, and this is really the best time for me. Is she here?”

Mya watched Delia’s hand light on her shoulder and flit away with spiteful concentration, as if it were some hated insect. “I don’t know. Probably I guess. She’s probably here.”

“Oh, so you know her? What’s your name?” Mya knew that whatever she said, it wouldn’t have the same impact on Delia as Delia’s name had had on her. She knew Jules had never mentioned her to this woman, and she stood now, the anonymous other woman of the other woman, a ridiculous position. For this reason partly, she wanted to return, in some way at least, the impact of naming. But as she looked at Delia, she wondered if she might have the urge to tell this woman her name even if they had no connection to each other.

As Mya viewed the woman’s polished face, her eyes and mouth which seemed to smile only to hide a desperation which could easily turn into an attack, as she took into account the few simple pieces of tasteful and valuable looking jewelry, which ornamented her thin frame, a product, no doubt, of years of fine food, good medicine, intellectual labor, and programmed exercise, when Mya heard the hard, clean, educated vowels of the woman’s words, smelled her light, flowery perfume, noticed the moonbeams catching the threads of her silk scarf tied over her statuesque shoulders, which held the straps of her lovely maroon dress, and made the perfect resting place for her flowing brown hair, when Mya looked 188

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at Delia then, she suddenly had a great urge to say her real name.

She had never wanted to tell someone her real name so much in her life.

She un-crumpled herself, squared her shoulders, and pronounced her name as she never had before, with pride, letting each syllable fall loudly, just where it should, enunciating each onomatopoeia and click and whistle in the correct spot, confidently and conceitedly, as her mother always had. When she finished, a still settled over the lawn as though she had just conjured an ancient voodoo incantation. The effect was more than pleasing. The look she was so accustomed to quickly spread over Delia Michigan’s spotless face. Delia’s eyes widened. She stepped back. Her mouth opened and closed. “I’m . . . sorry . . . what?” Delia asked, her wary eyes looking back and forth from Mya to her surroundings.

“That’s my name,” Mya explained. “You asked my name. I told you my name.”

“Oh.” Delia relaxed. Her eyes slanted and she leaned in, inspecting Mya’s features. “Is that . . . aboriginal?”

“I guess.” Mya said, spitting to the side. “My momma was pretty goddamned original.” She pointed to the house. “Anyhow, Jules is in there, up the stairs to the right. You can let yourself in. If anyone asks, just tell them I told you to go on in. They know my name.”

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track seven

School Night

“ hello .” her voice was timid. She stood at the door, a perfect specimen of the adulterous heroine, her scarlet dress unconsciously emblematic; her manner dignified, but with a forward lean like a bowing, worshipful and regretting, but without shame, apologetic yet guiltless. “Your roommate let me in.”

“My roommate?” Jules stood from her bed.

“The one with the strange name.” Delia stepped in. “May I?” Jules nodded. Delia closed the door behind herself. Jules stood in the center of the room, her arms at her sides with the stance of a person waiting in front of a firing squad. Delia folded her hands in front of her and gave Jules a pitying smile. She looked around the room. The mattress lay in the corner beside a mahogany desk.

Plants hung from the ceiling near Jules’s shelves, full of her weird collections and a few books. On the wall above the bed, a torn bit of a page hung in a small frame. The text read, What you risk reveals what you value. Delia noted it silently as she ran her finger along the edge of a bookshelf. “This is very nice,” Delia told her.

“You mean it’s better than my last place. It’s not nice. I know that.”

Delia exhaled a pained sigh. “No, it is very nice,” she said, approaching Jules. She took her hands in hers and tried to conjure regret in her expression, attempting to forewarn Jules, through looking, of what was to be said. She shook her head lightly, no.

Jules pulled away from her and went to the window. Delia stood 190

beside her looking out. On the lawn, Mya mounted Aryan and began riding slowly away. “You never told me you had a horse,” Delia said, watching the lawn.

“You never asked.” They shifted uncomfortably beside one another. “It’s not mine.”

“Where is she riding it?”

“Through the fields behind the houses, down to the abandoned factory lots, probably.”

“Is that legal?”

“You come here to talk about animal rights?”

Delia stepped away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed. “Jules, he knows.”

Jules did not look away from the window, “I know,” she said, her words monotone. “He called me this morning.”

“He called you? Oh God.” She covered her face with her hands and shook her thick hair, then looked back to Jules. “What did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She turned to Delia. “I took care of him.”

Jules wanted desperately to convince Delia of this, that she was capable of taking care of him, of taking care of everything. But she knew, other than the confidence in her voice and menacing look on her face, she had no evidence to back this up. “He’s not going to bother us again.” She leaned against the window ledge, placing sweaty palms on the dusty shelf to steady her trembling.

As she kept on, she listened, as if from a distance, to the insincerity and stupidity of the words which she could not seem to help coming. “I told him the truth. It’s all out now. He knows we’re in love, Delia. He knows you’re in love with me and there’s nothing he can do about it. It really blew him over actually. I don’t think he can handle it.”

Delia’s face shifted from sorrow to apprehension. “Jules,” she said, again shaking her head lightly, no. She pressed her palms into the mattress. “Jules, I do love you. You know that.”

“I know. That’s what I told him,” Jules said, maintaining her firm stance on the shifting sands of denial. Or maybe, Delia Track Seven: School Night

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thought, Jules’s approach was more of a calling of a bluff than a true state of denial.

Delia stood from the bed and approached Jules. She placed her hand tenderly on her face and kissed her on the forehead. Feeling tears come to her eyes, she pressed herself against Jules and looked over her shoulder out the window where moonlight played tricks with the shadows. “You’ll never know just how much I loved you.”

The words fell from her mouth in a broken whisper.

Jules’s body stiffened against her and stood from its reclining position. “Loved me?”

Delia met her eyes. They danced left to right across Jules’s face as if also telling her, no. “Don’t do this to yourself. You know I have loved you. You know I love you. This hurts me as much it hurts you. Probably more. You’re so young with so much ahead of you, and this was,” she sighed dramatically, “my last moment of elation.

I’ve loved it, Jules. It’s meant more to me than anything. But we both know it has to end now.”

Jules stared at a spot on the wall and bit down on her tongue. “I thought you came here to tell me you were leaving him.”

Delia remained calm, begging patiently by the window. “Oh hunny, why would you think that?”

Jules pounded her fists into the mattress and shouted, “Why would I think that? Because you always told me that if it came down to it, you would leave him!”

Delia clasped her hands as if in prayer, against her chest. “No, I told you I wished I could leave him. They’re two different things.”

Jules stopped pacing for a moment and looked at Delia disgustedly. “That’s sick. You wish you could leave him, but you’re staying with him? You’ve lived your last moment of . . . elation, and you just accept it? That’s sick. You’re sick.”

Delia’s voice dropped to a firmer tone. “I’m not as brave as you.

What can I say? You’re brave and passionate, but I need certain things from life that you don’t. If he knows, other people might know. I can’t risk that.”

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“Can’t risk what?” she hissed, “people knowing you’re in love with someone else? It happens all the time. But it’s not that is it?

I’m a woman. I’m Indian. Would it be different if I were a man, if I were white?

Delia let out a small laugh, “Not if you were a twenty-two-yearold white man, no. It wouldn’t be different.” Her eyebrows pinched together on her forehead. She smiled a small, defeated smile and shook her head again. “This is it. This is how it has to be.”

Jules slumped onto the bed and rested her head in her hands, leaning forward. “Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m broke. I dance and sing for money. I should have known. All this time, you were worried I was using you. But you were using me, Delia. You told me it didn’t matter how old I was, if I was penniless and homeless, that you loved me for me. But like everything else you say, it’s a bunch of shit.”

Delia sat down on the bed next to Jules, placing her arm around her shoulder. “Stop it.” She shook her slumped figure. Jules turned her face up to Delia’s. It was red and trembling and streaming with tears. Jules’s mouth was pulling down at the sides and her eyes were swelling shut. Her chest began to heave with sobs. Delia had never seen Jules cry. She did not look like the tough, butch lover she’d come to know, but a very small girl having her heart broken for the first time. The sight of it struck her with an almost maternal pang.

She cradled Jules’s head in her chest and rocked her. “I shouldn’t have let it get this far. I’m sorry. You’re too young.”

“Tell me it’s because you don’t love me anymore. Then I’ll accept it,” Jules said into her breasts. She pulled her head up, dried her eyes on her shirt and calmed her own crying. “Tell me,” she told Delia dramatically, “that you don’t love me anymore. Look me in the eye and tell me. Then I’ll let you go.”

Delia smoothed Jules’s hair. “Oh God, you’re such a kid.”

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last week, or when your husband was jacking off at me, or when you were on your knees, begging me to love you! I was making good money! You made me choose. I chose you! You made me dependent on you, and now you’re choosing him.”

“You’re making it fine on your own now.” Delia stood and petted Jules’s shoulders. “I can’t look you in the eye and tell you I don’t love you. I’m doing this because I do love you. You have your entire life ahead of you and there’s no future with us. You know that. I understand you’re hurt, but you have to forget about me now. James is powerful, and he doesn’t play fair. Jules, you’re so vulnerable.”

Jules stepped back away from her, her face flushing. “I’m not so vulnerable. You should be afraid for him. Not for me. Don’t you worry about me. Worry about him.”

“Oh please don’t talk that way. I can’t protect you from him he’s . . . he’s . . .”

“Evil,” Jules filled in her words. “He’s evil. And he deserves what he gets.”

“He’s not evil, he just doesn’t take well to losing, or threats. His ego has been hurt. Just stay away. Promise me.”

Jules stood trembling and tensed in the middle of the floor, staring at the wall. She did not respond. Delia approached her cautiously and kissed her on the cheek, then held her close. “You’ll understand when you’re older,” she said. “Or maybe, if you don’t understand, at least you’ll forgive me. I know I haven’t always been perfect to you, but I did my best. I’m sorry.” Delia stepped back from her and waited for some response. Jules gave none. “I have to go. I don’t have much time.”

“You never did,” Jules said coldly, still staring at the wall. Delia looked shamefully to the floor, then she reached into her scarf, pulled out a small envelope and placed it on the side table. “Jules, there’s one more thing,” Delia said, her voice trembling, her eyes beginning to redden.

“What thing?”

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Delia fingered the envelope. “There’s some money in here. It’s not much, but . . .”

“You brought money? That’s just fucking perfect. What are you, paying me off ?”

“It will help you get started.”

“Get started? Get started doing what?”

Delia shook her head again at the ceiling, her stance full of regret and certainty. “If it weren’t for this, I wouldn’t have come here and put you through such a painful scene.”

Jules stepped toward her, her face a disgusted question. “What do you mean? If it weren’t for what? You wouldn’t have come here? What would you have done, just disappeared?”

Delia’s face cleared. She squared her jaw at Jules. “You have to leave the city.”

Jules let out a hissing laugh, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m very serious.” All maternal expressions of love had left Delia. She stood before Jules now like a boss ordering her employee.

“Jules, it’s the logical next step. You can live anywhere. It doesn’t matter for you. We both know that.”

Jules waved her hand in the air, attempting to clear the absurdity from the room. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t make a bigger deal out of this than it is. There’s enough money for at least the first month’s rent on an apartment.”

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” Jules shouted loudly.

Delia stepped forward and grabbed Jules by the wrists. “Calm down.”

Jules violently flung her off. “You calm down! Whatever made you think I would leave?”

“You have to. If you don’t, he’s going to shut down the house and the theater. He’ll have them condemned, and I don’t know what else he might do. He wants to make you look bad before you get a chance to make him look bad.”

Jules stepped up to Delia, nose to nose. “Fuck him and fuck you too.”

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Delia placed a hand on Jules’s chest and held her away. “He’s afraid you’re going to slander him in the press, or make some kind of scene about us. It’s a small city. He just doesn’t want you around.

It doesn’t have to be forever. Just get away for a couple of years.”

The room seemed to vibrate. A painful humming filled Jules’s ears as she viewed her lover for the first time clearly, as a cold enemy.

There were, at that moment, two sides to the world, Delia stood on one side, Jules on the other. A flood of molten lava seemed to flow between them. Jules felt they were as divided by their understanding of existence as any two human beings could be. “You know this is the first time I’ve had a real place, and now you’re telling me I have to leave or your husband is going to take it away from me?”

“I’m sorry, but Jules, really, you know you can live anywhere.

You’re not tied to a family or a business, and I’m giving you money.”

Jules sat on the bed and cradled her head in her hands. “Just get out,” she said hoarsely.

Delia came up to her and bent down, making a final attempt to cement her arrangement. “You have to leave. He and I don’t speak so directly, but he eluded to some upsetting ideas. I made it clear that I would handle this problem. I told him this wasn’t a moment for us to act rashly. Right now, he’s letting me. But I can’t protect you if you stay.”

Jules raised her eyes accusingly to Delia. “Not a time for us to act rashly? When did you two get so chummy?”

“Jules,” Delia sighed, and stood upright smacking her thighs with her hands, “you have to listen to me. If he knows, other people could know and we . . . he can’t risk that.”

Jules lay back in her bed and began laughing hysterically, covering her face with her hands. “It’s not him, it’s you. You don’t want anyone to know. You’re devastatingly ashamed aren’t you?” She looked Delia menacingly in eye, grabbed her own nipples and pinched them at her. “You fucked a dyke, a homeless whore.” She laughed and rolled. “Maybe I should go to the tabloids. It’s the kind of thing you see, isn’t it? Business executive and local charity head 196

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in a gay sex scandal. I’ll tell them how you paid me to fuck you while he watched. Is that what you think? What do the papers pay for that kind of story?” Delia folded her arms, her bottom lip showed a quiver of fear. “I’m not like you, Delia. Don’t worry. I’m not the scum of the earth like you two.”

“Jules . . .” Delia began, breathlessly.

“You’re not trying to protect me.” Jules sat up on the edge of the bed, visibly trembling as she spoke. “Just admit it. You don’t want me here anymore. You’re afraid for your reputation. You had a moment of elation? More like a mid-life crisis or something, and now you want it to go away. You’re paying me to go away.”

Delia folded her arms. She shifted impatiently, anger darting at her eyes. “Fine, however you need to think of it.”

“However I need to think of it? You just want this over now, I guess?”

Delia nodded. “Okay, I admit it. I do. Look, I am trying to protect you. But if you love me as much as I love you,” her voice was cold and officious, “you will protect me too. Take the money and move away.” Jules hoped Delia would become soft and apologetic again, but she had shifted easily and quickly into dealing with this goodbye as a tedious incident that was taking longer than she had expected. She looked like a business executive trying to resolve an unmanageable situation, no longer a guilt-stricken lover.

“It’s going to take more than a month’s rent to pay me off,” Jules tried, her mouth dry, her words cracking under the weight of disbelief.

“I’ve already paid you a lot more than that, Jules, let’s be honest.” Delia sighed impatiently again. “Don’t make this more complicated than it needs . . .”

She was cut off by a kind of sharp manic squealing that she had never heard Jules produce, “GET OUT!” Jules howled sitting up in her bed. Her anger took her in a seizure of hyperventilation.

She grabbed the lamp from the side table and flung it at the wall.

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OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!” Jules screamed, as Delia Michigan made her terrified, fumbling retreat. mya hadn ’ t wanted to see Jules at all. She hadn’t known if Delia had left, and was trying not to wonder over it. Feeling refreshed from her hours riding with Aryan, learning the abandoned paths of the outskirts of the city that led through strips of trees like thin lines of forest, and along shabby train tracks all the way down to forgotten legs of the Mississippi, she’d washed all thoughts of Delia and the hate she’d aroused in her from her head. She’d come in late, tiptoeing up the stairs, hoping to make it into her bedroom unannounced and fall into an equally uneventful sleep. But Jules was waiting with the door open and light on, pacing around her own room like a caged animal amidst a pile of papers. She’d heard the creak of Mya’s step on the last stair and quickly retrieved her from the hallway, escorting her by the elbow into her room. She locked the door behind them.

Mya had kept silent, regarding Jules, who was a trembling mass of energy, an endless stream of words, with wary concern and irritation. As soon as Jules locked the door behind them, she sat herself down cross-legged on the floor and began sifting through the papers that were strewn about her in a whirlpool of information. She waved her hand at Mya. “Come here,” she said, “I’ll explain it all to you.”

Mya stepped through the papers and stood over Jules. “Explain what?” she asked, her voice scratched with exhaustion. Jules turned her wide eyes up to Mya. They seemed to spin like two saucer-sized joker’s wheels and Mya was worried where the needle might land.

Jules hadn’t taken her first real heartbreak well. Her ego was too big and her insecurity too mighty. She was a sleepless, manic wreck of vengeful emotion.

“You were right,” Jules said, her voice shaking under the weight of excitement and purpose. “We have to be in this together. You have to know everything.”

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“Everything?”

“Look.” She held open a white envelope filled with crisp bills.

“Fifteen hundred dollars. We have enough to make the remote for the bomb and then some.” Mya’s body suddenly felt leaden. Jules had never said it so clearly to her before. She sat down across from Jules, folding her legs under. “I know,” Jules continued, “you don’t see why it’s important yet, but you have to try to understand.” She shifted through the pile of papers frantically, until she plucked two that seemed to be the right ones. She held a printed photo up to Mya of a plump Indian woman in an orange sari, a bead on her forehead, smiling gleefully into the camera. “See this woman?

Do you know who she is?” Mya shook her head, no. A trance had come over her. Her mouth hung slightly open and her eyes reflected the disaster she was watching unfold in front of her, the disaster of Jules this night. “This is Vandana Shiva. She’s a seed activist in India.”

“Seed activist?” Mya repeated.

“Yeah. I’m trying to explain to you about Monsanto,” Jules continued, impatience squeezing her voice shrill. “Do you know what hybrid seeds are?” Mya shook her head no. She thought of going to get Christie to calm Jules down. “They’re like, two seeds put together, genetically engineered seeds. They can’t be saved and their crops don’t produce fertile seeds, so farmers have to buy them new every year.” Jules wiped the bit of sweat that was beading on her forehead, and poked the photograph with a trembling finger.

“They were marketed really well in India and other poorer countries, because people thought they would make more food than regular seeds, but you have to buy special Monsanto pesticides and fertilizer to get them to grow. The farmers who bought them were signed into really aggressive contracts, and after having used them for years, haven’t saved their own real seeds, and these seeds, like I said, don’t reproduce. Do you know Monsanto owns patents of over one million species of food seeds?”

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looked around the room as if for some way out. She feared Jules had gone off the deep end. She wanted to ask what had happened with Delia, but didn’t dare.

“That doesn’t bother you?” Jules asked, her voice rising, pushing her face aggressively up to Mya’s.

“I don’t know what you’re worryin about. We grow our own food here. We’re fine.”

Jules’s eyes strained toward her for some understanding. “But that’s not enough,” she said. “They’re enslaving the world’s farmers! They’re trying to own food, and they’re getting away with it.

It doesn’t bother you that most of the vegetables people buy aren’t even natural anymore?” Mya did not respond but stared terrified ahead. Jules handed Mya a second paper, stood and began rummaging through the stack of information on her desk as she continued. “They’ve engineered the food to look better: redder, spotless apples; bigger, brighter oranges. Seedless grapes! Like everything has to be picture perfect. But it doesn’t taste the same.

You have to use horrible chemicals to make it grow. It doesn’t reproduce.” She found a paper and held it firmly in her hands.

Her body shivered visibly. Her bottom lip quaked as she stared down at it. “We’re not perfect,” she said quietly, angrily. “Why do they want everything to look so perfect? It looks beautiful and tastes awful. It makes us slaves.”

“Hunny, I don’t think yer really talking bout food,” Mya tried cautiously from the floor.

Jules snapped back to attention. “No,” she said, heading back toward Mya and holding out another sheet of paper. “I’m talking about the Terminator.”

“What?”

“The Terminator.” She shoved the paper at Mya again. The complicated words danced in Mya’s head. She read to herself from the top line of the paper, trying to make sense of it.

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Delta Line Company-Proposition for reduction of volunteer plants: TERMINATOR, Genetic use restriction technology (GURT), proposed methods for restricting the use of genetically modified plants through technologically induced sterilization of seeds; fertility regeneration usage in collaboration with Traitor Technology (V-GURT).

Mya shook her head and held the paper back up to Jules. “I don’t understand this,” she said. “What’s Terminator?” She looked back to the paper and read aloud, stumblingly, “What’s volunteer plant?”

Jules sighed impatiently. “Volunteer plants are plants that grow from natural seeds, plants that grow on their own and reproduce; natural plants. Don’t you get it? They engineer plants to be dependent on their pesticides and chemical fertilizers. The Terminator is a new technology they are developing to stunt fertilization in seeds, but, and this is the kicker, it would allow those seeds to become fertile, reproductive again, if the farmers purchase a chemical technology from them that can be mixed with the seeds.” Jules sat down across from Mya and held her by the shoulders, almost shaking her. “They’re the crazy ones. Not me!”

“No one said you was crazy,” Mya told her, leaning away.

“They’re chemically engineering a natural process and making people pay for it! They’re chemically engineering seeds to become unfertile then fertile again, when they would naturally just be fertile to start with. Don’t you get it? It’s like a solar-powered tanning booth! It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What?”

“Look, Mya.” Jules let go of her shoulders and again picked up the photo of the seed activist woman. “They’re developing this new technology right here, in Saint Louis. It’s a sign. I know it is, that I’m here and so close in so many ways. This must be how Vandana felt when she started.”

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Mya also looked at the woman’s face. “But she didn’t blow no one up, did she?” she said.

“I’m not going to blow anyone up either. Just the Terminator.

I’m just gonna blow up the Terminator.”

“You gonna blow up the Terminator?”

Jules nodded yes. Still looking down at the picture, she incanted, “I’m going to destroy the Terminator.” mya was awakened the morning of

her eighteenth birthday to the sound of a loud knocking. She rubbed her black makeup around her eyes with her small fists, tossed the cover aside, adjusted her black dress, and rose to meet the day. She poked her head into the hallway and glimpsed Chris stepping into Jules’s bedroom.

The sun was shining brightly from the east through her window.

It’s too goddamned early anyway, she thought, and tossed herself back into bed, stomach down. The memory of the night before still swam in her head. All the complicated words were pounding at her brain like a hammer trying to force a nail into a brick wall.

Lying stomach down on her bed, the morning sun warming her back, Mya felt the urge to laugh as she remembered those words. She flopped over and stretched her arms above her head.

Then she remembered something else that cut her laughing short and sent a layer of frost between her skin and the sun’s heat. She tilted her head skeptically toward the closet where, last night, Jules had deposited the black suitcase before finally having heard Mya’s pleas to be left alone to sleep. She let out a small groan and covered her head with a pillow. Just as she was about to once more fall into sleep, she was awoken by another knocking, this time unmistakably on her own door.

“Who is it?” Mya moaned.

“It’s Chris. Can I come in?”

Mya stood and opened the door. Chris smiled what seemed to her to be a forced smile and held out a small green cupcake with a pink candle sticking up from its center. She lit it. “Let me be the

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first to wish you happy birthday. Christie and the boys made a big batch of vegan cupcakes for you.”

“Oh.” Mya tried to conceal a grimace. “Well thanks, I guess.”

“Make a wish and blow it out.”

“Right.” Mya closed her eyes and thought hard.

I wish to always be far from violence, she thought, and blew, but the candle’s flame was persistent. Mya blew again hard. It went out for a moment, then there was a small spark, and it re-lit itself. Mya looked about her for the witchery.

Chris chuckled. “It’s a trick candle. Here.” She linked her fingers and pinched the flame out.

“Figures,” Mya said dejectedly, taking the cupcake from Chris.

“Thanks a lot, anyway.”

Chris held the door open with her hand. “Mya, would you mind if I came in and took a look around your room? I just want to make sure there are no leaks, no loose wires, or anything.”

Mya stepped aside. “I got no complaints, but sure.”

Mya began pulling a comb through her tangle of black hair as Chris poked around her room. “How’s Jules?” she asked.

“Didn’t you just go see her?”

“Oh, yes. I just mean, well maybe it’s none of my business, but, has she been acting strangely lately?”

Mya bit her bottom lip and watched Chris skeptically in the mirror. If it had been Christie asking these questions, she would have at least told her that she was worried Jules might be losing it. There was a chance she might have told her everything. But Mya didn’t know or trust Chris. She wasn’t even sure she liked her. She was too tall, too skinny, too cold for anything. “What did you say you was looking for? Leaks? There been leaks in the house?”

Chris crawled on her knees, peeking under the bed. “Um . . . yeah, there was a leak in the bathroom. Old pipes, you know?”

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Mya told Chris, turning from the mirror to face her. “She just got her heart hurt, that’s all. But it’ll heal.”

Chris stood and dusted off her knees. She nodded. “Good.”

“So, no leaks?” Mya asked.

Chris scanned the small sparsely decorated room, from the bed to the dresser to the chair. “Doesn’t look like it.” Her eyes stopped on the white sliding door in the wall. “Do you mind if I take a quick peek in your closet? There’s a water pipe that runs right along the wall in there.”

Like hell there is, Mya thought. But she was well versed in hiding and lying from years of sneaking pills and sweets around the doctors and nurses. She had learned that lying and hiding lends not even the slightest hint of a moment of hesitation. She nodded, headed to the closet and slid open the door, then stood next to Chris as they both pretended to be interested in looking at the closet ceiling. “Don’t look like nothing,” Mya told her. “But knock yerself out.” She made her way over to the chair and pulled on her stockings. Chris rummaged in the closet, feeling around the wall, then at the corners.

“You don’t have many clothes,” Chris told her. She eyed the black suitcase that sat on the floor below the handful of black dresses, shirts, and skirts that hung on the pole.

“That your suitcase?”

Mya did not look up. “Yep.” Chris hesitated a moment. Jules had vehemently denied her accusations, gone so far as to call her paranoid, racist, and all sorts of other things. If she was wrong, she thought, then that would put her in a very awkward position, lending credence to Jules’s statements about her character. Still, an unshakable feeling gnawed at her gut and the words fell from her mouth, “What’s in it?”

Mya started in disbelief. “What you askin?” she said, her voice rising with frustration. “What’s that got to do with leaks?

“Nothing, I just . . . want to look, if you don’t mind.”

“That part of the house rules? I got to show you what’s in my drawers and all sometimes?”

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“No, of course not.” Chris shifted uncomfortably.

“I didn’t think so.” Mya said, as she grabbed her boots from the corner and began putting them on. “Helen’s like part owner of this place since years back. She told me the rules when I moved in.

She never mentioned that one.” Chris closed the closet door and stood with her back against the wall. Taking into consideration the girl’s explosive character, Chris continued haltingly. “Look, I know you’re, well, I know you haven’t had many people close to you in life you could trust, and maybe,” she struggled for words, “I know when a person goes through the kind of things that you have, well, maybe when people are good to you, you don’t always see them for what they are . . .” Her words trailed off. From the look on Mya’s face, it seemed this was not the correct route.

Indeed, she had clicked a lever in Mya’s head, sparking a fiery process of cementing her loyalty to Jules, against Chris. She tied her boots tight and stood, feigned confusion and real anger mixing on her face. She shook her head no and placed her hands firmly on her hips. Chris was surprised at the certain and intimidating stance this young girl was able to take against her. “What you know about what I gone through?” she asked aggressively. “You come in here acting weird today and asking me strange questions and then tell me what’s goin on inside me about I don’t know what. What you want?”

At that moment, there was a knock at the door and Helen’s heavily accented voice came booming through in a singsong tone, “Happy birthday to you!”

Mya’s face paled, and her firm stance quickly withered to that of a desperate flower. “Did you know she was coming?” she whispered, her face twisting into a beg.

Chris shook her head, “No. I thought she was in Texas till next week.”

“Are you in there, Mya deavutchka?” Mya rolled her eyes when she heard it. My little girl, she thought. Every time Helen called her by her new name, she heard the word mine, as in Helen’s.

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the girl with the unpronounceable name, who had been

renamed a mark of ownership by her first lover, could have been happier with her eighteenth birthday. Although she was flanked on either side by lovers, Helen and Jules doing their best to maintain more than a level of civility, indeed, maintaining a genuine spirit of camaraderie and celebration; and although the woman who had been so like a loving older sister sat smiling and sending her well wishes from across the table; although Chris put away her perturbation and grievances with Jules, at least for a few hours, returning to her heady, tempered manner, the tension in the air was palpable.

This dinner at this fancy restaurant where these women who she’d come to think of as family held up strange bits of raw fish and seaweed to her mouth between polished sticks, almost as a dare, laughing gleefully as they did so and pouring her warm liquor, handing her little gifts, seemed to her to be more of a moment that stood outside of time, rather than a good time that she was actually experiencing. It was as if warring characters in a play she’d been watching suddenly stopped their actions to form an incandescent tableau, each joining hands with the other, creating some ephemeral symbol of what could be, but what Mya was becoming more certain was an impossibility, at least on the stage that had been set for her life. Although she tried to cherish the moment of peace they created around her in celebration of her passage into adulthood, she was painfully aware this was neither the first act nor the closing scene, this was simply a brief intermission. she recalled her sixth birthday, the year after her mother had

been let out of prison. How like a stranger she had seemed to her and yet how familiar. Although her parents divorced while her mother was in jail, the two families came together to celebrate that birthday. That day, in fact, was not so unlike this. She remembered the feel of her mother’s stomach against her back as she helped blow out the purple candles, and the pinched expressions on the faces of her father’s parents, attempting in vain to exude some 206

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sense of normalcy and cheer. The harder they grasped at normalcy though, the more apparent the cracks in the facade became.

They were outnumbered anyway, her father and his parents, by the six siblings and various partners who came in solidarity with her mother, none of whom attempted to maintain their ex in-law’s idea of uniformity. How could they, accompanying their sister, a felon full of wild delusions, to this party thrown for her daughter by people who hated and feared her?

They had been very loud, exuding an arrogant pride about the fact that they were not and would never be, for that matter, had never thought of being civilized people. They brought beer and wine to a party for a six year old and drank more than was appropriate for a dinner party, inquired rudely about the prices of the furniture, the house, the car. Her mother’s sister, China, even hinted that her father might owe her mother some alimony.

Her father then looked so like a hurt child, more than Mya ever had. Mya sat between them feeling herself to be the field on which they warred. Her father could have, no doubt, taken all the rights away from her mother. But he was very young, and her mother a very forceful person. He was insistent that his daughter needed to be with her mother as well, a decision for which his own mother would never forgive him, and for good reason. Years later, after her own husband had died, she inherited the wreckage of her son’s decision; and that is what Mya felt herself to be, a burdensome wreckage, a pile of rotten wood in the corner that reminded everyone of a catastrophe, that they were not obliged to toss out and be rid of. late in the night , Mya made her way back to the house, four women following sleepily behind her, carrying her various gifts: a new saddle from Helen, a black tutu nearly identical to the one she already owned from Chris and Christie, a thick, silver bracelet from Jules. She stood and watched from the porch as they made their way up the walk.

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Who were these people and how had they become her life? Mya stood, wondering how she had found herself in this place, feeling herself to be the wreckage of careless decisions. She realized, at that moment, that she had made very few careful decisions thus far in her life. I’m an adult now, she thought, it’s time I start taking responsibility for myself. Up to this point, she had been moving around things, a nebulous idea of herself, reacting more than acting. A pang shot in her stomach. She missed her mother, she missed her father, her grandmother, and all her uncles. All of them were in her, in some way, as her pride of being strange and uncivilized and also as a fear of herself, as a feeling of herself as a battleground upon which loved ones warred.

She turned and entered the house. The women sat her gifts on the table. Chris and Christie wished her a happy birthday again, kissed her goodnight, and headed upstairs.

Helen and Jules milled around downstairs as if waiting for her to give them some direction. Jules went into the kitchen and poured herself a drink. Mya sat on the couch and held her head in her hands, feeling Helen’s eyes upon her. “You like the party?”

Helen asked. Mya nodded. Helen sat on the couch next to her, placing her arm heavily around her shoulder. “But I haven’t really shown you yet your real present,” she said, smiling and shaking Mya excitedly. Jules entered the living room and stood in the doorway, a whiskey in her hand, watching them. Mya noted a turmoil in Jules. The disturbance she had kept at bay throughout dinner was becoming visible again in her eyes and manner. Part of her wanted to take Jules to bed and caress her into peace. She looked back to Helen’s gleaming moon face, which dimmed when Jules entered. Part of her wanted to take Helen to bed and bathe in the ignorant bliss of her affection.

Jules took a large gulp of her drink. “Well,” she said, “that was a good night.” She gave a cheers to the air and sipped her drink.

“Yes. Very good night,” Helen agreed, removing her arm from Mya’s shoulder and leaning back on the couch.

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Jules shifted in the doorway. She set her jaw square and gulped hard. “Well, Helen, it’s nice to see you again.”

Helen forced a smile, but her tone was impatient, “And you too.”

Jules nodded, turned and went back into the kitchen then reemerged a few seconds later with the entire bottle of whiskey in her hand. “You two haven’t seen each other for a while, so, I’ll leave you alone,” she said, her voice bumping over the words.

Mya stood from the couch and approached her. “You sure you need that whole bottle, hunn?” she asked, just above a whisper.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’ll see you in the morning.” Jules took Mya’s chin in her thumb and finger and kissed her sweetly on the forehead. Mya opened her arms and embraced Jules in a warm hug.

“See ya in the morning,” she said, “don’t you knock yerself out.” Mya patted her on the back and Jules made her way upstairs.

When Jules was out of sight, she turned back to Helen, determined to start making her own careful decisions. “Helen hunn,” she said, “I sure am beat and I need a night just alone. Just need to be with myself and my thoughts now, ya understand?”

Helen’s eyes narrowed, but she was still smiling. She quickly moved past Mya’s statement as if it hadn’t been made, snatching Mya by the waist and pulling her down onto the couch. She situated Mya nicely on her lap. And although she was frustrated, Mya couldn’t help but giggle, feeling the spark of excitement low in her stomach that always came when Helen took such physical control of her. “Sure you need some time alone,” Helen said, holding her close and nuzzling her neck. “You’re a woman now and womans need time alone sometimes.” Helen pulled her harder against her, grabbing her stomach and kissing her neck forcefully. Mya’s face reddened. She had always very much enjoyed Helen’s physical affection. Her controlling manner drove her crazy in both good ways and bad.

Mya smiled and pushed Helen back. “I’m serious,” she told her, “I got some thinking to do, and some sleeping too.”

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“I have something to give you, then you go to sleep,” Helen said. Although she was smiling and accepting Mya’s demand in words, disappointment was written on her. “You do have thinking to do tonight,” Helen continued. She pulled an envelope from her jacket pocket. Keeping Mya on her lap, she open the envelope and revealed its contents: a photo of a gray farmhouse situated on a green hill, a pasture visible in the background, one firm oak tree shading its eastmost side. Mya’s expression grew solemn. “This is your real present,” Helen said, placing the photo in Mya’s limp hands. “It’s yours if you want it. It’s mine now. It’s ours.”

Mya sighed, “I already got a good place here. I got you and Jules and Christie.”

Helen laughed and shook her head. She wrapped her arms around Mya and bounced her. “This is a real house with real barn and big land!” She leaned back and indicated herself with her hand on her own chest. “I am free love,” she said. “You know I am free love. I do not like the jealousy games. But also, I am not playing a child’s game with you. With you I am very serious. You are right. You are a woman now, and you need space for yourself.

You need space for Ryan. Ryan can’t stay here forever. It’s not good for her.”

“Her name is Aryan,” Mya grumbled.

“Mya, deavutchka, I love you. I want the best for you.” Helen took Mya’s head in both her hands and kissed her face all over. She held her then, looking her very seriously in the eye. “I like your Jules. I do. I always liked her. But I don’t think she is very serious, no?” Mya tried to look away. Helen held her tight in her gaze. She let her expression lighten. “If she wants to visit sometimes, she can.

I am not a dictator. I know you are much younger than me. I know what it is to be young.” She let go of Mya’s face. Mya looked again to the photo in her hand. Question swelled inside her.

“Where is it?” she asked.

“Just outside of Kansas City, Kansas. Not far from here.”

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photo in one hand. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. I can’t just . . . just leave now.”

“Not now, soon.” Helen’s eyes showed with happy confidence, watery and bright. “I worked to get this for you. If not for you, I don’t need a barn and so much land.” Mya winced away. Helen pulled her back. “I did this because I adore you. But this is your decision. You are a smart girl. You think about it. You tell me your decision? Okay?”

Mya’s mind felt suddenly like a trampled flower. She nodded yes, weakly. Helen bounced her again. “Don’t get so sad. There’s no reason to be so sad. Not every girl gets a house on her eighteenth birthday.” Mya studied Helen’s face. Her face was round and moon shaped, sweet but rough, something hard and country lived inside her, as well as an intense passion that Mya thought of as a distinctively Russian intensity, even though Helen was the only real Russian she had ever known. She felt Helen’s oak tree arms around her. Helen smelled like a truck driver, musky, gleaming up at her with her dewy eyes that shone with the intensity of a crazed poet below her curly brown, disheveled hair. “I think you’ll make a good decision,” Helen told her, and kissed her lightly on the mouth. She shifted below her and Mya felt a spark in her lower stomach again. Mya moaned and leaned in, kissing Helen back harder. Helen did not need much to entice her. She stood and flipped Mya on her back, topping her on the couch. The photo fell to the floor. Mya would, finally, return to her room to sleep alone in her own bed, but not before she let Helen control her, driving her crazy in a good way. Why not? It was, after all, her birthday. from the road , the house appeared cradled in a lullaby of

moonlight and foliage, the porch light and one glowing window on the top floor twinkling like two sleepy eyes. The house held its inhabitants in wombs of slumber; two lovers who embraced each other stomach to back locked in the magnetic gravity of duty and peace that graced them unconditionally each night with the Track Seven: School Night

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promise of un-fitted sleep and companionship; two young men in their separate rooms, one curled like infant into his solitary rest, the other splayed like a smashed insect naked and drooling sweetly through his soggy dreaming; a large woman snoring out her girth from the couch; the insane child sleeping in her skirt and boots, armed, her legs twitching out animal chase scenarios catching a steady groundspeed through the sleep that seldom left her rested; and the one who remained starry-eyed, awake, haunted by the voices of so many desires, burning on the floor next to a half finished bottle of whiskey, a phone next to her razed head of tsunami, repeatedly dialing a number and listening to the ring, like the ring of the old cemetery bell, harkening to the truth that somewhere, something unanswered had been buried alive under the weight of not-so-impossible decision.

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track eight

Telephone

Inside her head like fire there swarmed the illusion of conflict, but really, there was no struggle. The wick of prudence had long dried, acquiescing remorselessly to the stinging needles of violence flaming. She pressed her fingers to the floor, where she lay on her side, her phone ringing perpetually against her ear. The bottle of whiskey also lay open, now empty. Outside, the birds chirped and the sun gave only the smallest notion of arrival.

Eyes of bees, eyes of flies bitten red with sleeplessness buzzing at the ceiling light. She no longer noticed the ringing. It was a peripheral sound, much like her mechanical pressing of the call button; her body had found a rhythm, a new meter syncopated with heartbeat and breath for several hours now, the ringing, eight rings to be exact, the beep, then the pressing, and again. At this point she no longer expected anything to come of it. It had become an act toward no end, an act in and of itself, and she had lost the notion of the ringing affecting anything beyond the sound reverberating in her ear—lost all notion of the fact that somewhere on the other end, someone was being called. The ringing may as well have been her lone dog hurt howling into the darkness.

She had forgotten she had ever expected an answer. She had almost, at least on any cerebral level, forgotten the cause of her anguish. It began to manifest through these hours as an autonomous emotion, congenital within her, the object of her desire negated by the formation of her desire as object. So, when her 213

affectation was cut short, she was rendered momentarily speechless, having long ago abandoned any reciprocal notions of purpose inherent to calling out.

There was a click and Delia’s voice came through tired and breathless from the other end, “Yes, yes. Hello.” Silence stretched through the air connecting them. “For God sake, Jules.” Jules blinked, opened and closed her dry mouth and rolled onto her back, attempting to regain some mode of consciousness. “Jules, say something. I have 152 missed calls. What? What’s happened?

Has something happened?” Jules let out a small groan, laid the phone on the floor and sat up, scratching her weary head. Delia’s voice echoed from the phone, “You’re there. Jules, are you there?

Goddamnit, say something!” She picked the phone up and put it back to her ear. “Oh, God, I can’t do this. He’s watching me like a hawk. He’s going to check my calls. Jules. What is it? Jesus Christ!”

“What do you believe in?” Her voice was broken and deep, the words fumbling their way out of her mouth like an infant’s toward no obvious end.

“What? Jules, has something happened?”

“Do you believe in me?” Delia was silent. “Do you believe in spontaneous combustion?”

“You have to stop calling. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

“I asked you a question, Delia. Do you believe in me or in spontaneous combustion? You can’t believe in both. These two beliefs are mutually exclusive. You have to choose one. Pick your religion.

This is very important.”

“Are you drunk? Have you been drinking? Jules, you’re scaring me.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. Do you believe in me, or in spontaneous combustion?”

Delia’s voice was angry, but there was a quivering fear hiding behind the fortress of her sturdy tone. “I don’t understand this riddle. I’m sorry. I’ve never been good at mind games.”

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Jules let out a punctuated cackle. “That’s not true!” She cleared her throat. “It’s simple, if you believe in one, you can’t believe in the other.” Delia held her silence contemplating. “Well?” Jules persisted.

“Fine. What is this supposed to mean, do I believe in spontaneous combustion or you?” She sighed heavily, “Why can’t I believe in one and the other?” she asked with the air of a tired adult entertaining a child’s fancies. The air would soon be sucked out of the party balloon.

“Because if you believe in spontaneous combustion, then you don’t believe in me and vice-versa.”

“For fuck sake!” Delia squealed.

“Have patience. I’m explaining.” Jules’s voice had a menacing quality unfamiliar to her. “Delia,” Jules said, “if you don’t believe in me, then it’s possible the construction site for your husband’s new plant spontaneously combusted in December.” She paused.

“So the two are mutually exclusive. Wouldn’t you agree?”

People often speak of silences as pregnant, as well as pauses.

This silence was a pause, was a moment outside of time, outside of lineage, unlike a pregnancy, was a death of potential. This silence was an abortion. The silence poured out from them, stillness, still as the mangled wreck of emotion that lay between them, which once had been meeting place for any future hope of peace.

“You’re drunk,” Delia said. “You’re saying the most ridiculous things.”

Jules stood and went to the mirror. She watched herself speaking. “I’m ridiculous? No, Delia, you’re the one who believes in spontaneous combustion. You’re ridiculous, if anyone is.” The lines around her eyes illustrated surrender, more than mania, even below the redness that glowed where the whites once were. She bit at her lip ring and gave herself a questioning look. Who am I, she wondered. Her dark brown Mohawk hung like a defeated whale fin to the side, sweeping over her pierced eyebrow. Dyke, scumfuckpunk, dirty brown, broke, worthless piece of shit, she thought, as she rested Track Eight: Telephone

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her forehead on the mirror, feeling the coolness of the glass pressing against her skin. “I told you,” she continued, “you don’t have to worry about him so much. He’s dangerous, but so am I. I told you, I can handle myself.” Her voice was monotone and sounded to Delia as though she were talking in her sleep.

She blinked her eyes closed and thought of Mya. The image of the girl flashed in the space where her forehead touched the mirror. The thought of Mya calmed her, steadied her, but also filled her with its own specific anguish. Loving Mya, she felt, but not in words, she only experienced this emotion with the most visceral pangs of anxiety and regret which she would never fully admit to or even acknowledge within herself; loving Mya did not make her a better person. Loving Mya and Mya’s love for her held her where she was, held her immobile in her place. Her love for Mya did not add any sense of value to her identity or to thoughts of herself, sometimes even, the love made her feel less valuable to herself. Yet she did love Mya, loved her as one loves a thing of beauty, truly, and in truth, with a greater intensity than she loved Delia. If her need for some outward affirmation of her own potential value had been stripped away, she would not have felt that when she lost Delia, she was losing everything.

She enjoyed having rendered Delia speechless. She pictured her standing in a locked room in some handmade dress, her mouth agape, phone pressed to her ear, anxiously awaiting the next revelation. As she pictured this, a pang of love shot through her, a painful stab of wanting, of losing. She began pacing, shaking her head as she continued her incongruous diatribe. “I should have known, when it comes down to a choice between a man and woman, you’re always going to pick the man.” She paused. “Why is that?”

“Jules,” Delia whispered, “stop it, please.”

“Is it because you think they’re more capable of defending you, defending themselves? I think you like the fact that he’s dangerous, really. But you should know, I’m not some helpless little girl. Worry about him, not me.”

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“You’re threatening me. You realize you’re threatening me right now?”

“Not you, Delia, I’m not threatening you, although you have threatened me. How do you think the people felt who they used the Agent Orange that Monsanto produced on? Do you think they felt threatened? Do you think the farmers in India your husband sued penniless for saving seeds felt threatened? Do you think I should feel threatened that the same company that manufactures biological military weapons also manufactures the majority of the nation’s food? You would think the son of a Holocaust survivor would have a more finely tuned ethical meter than all that.”

Delia’s frame had shifted from that of one speaking to a jilted lover, to one speaking to a ransom artist. “I didn’t realize you were so knowledgeable on my husband. I thought it was just me that interested you.”

“You’re the one who’s not usually that interested in your husband’s work. I’ve always found it exceedingly interesting.”

“Is that why you pursued me, to get to my husband?”

“I didn’t pursue you. You said he doesn’t respond well to threats.

Neither do I.” Jules sat down on her bed. “He threatened me, Delia. He threatened my home and my family. These people are my family.” She pounded a fist into the mattress. “If you or he tries to lay a hand on this place, or sends the city after us or whatever, I’m just telling you, you better not. He better not. I will respond adequately.”

“What does that mean, adequately?”

“I loved you. God, you made me love you, but fuck you, Delia.

I love you, but fuck you.”

“I’m confused—you insinuated that you already burned down one of his buildings? You weren’t threatened then, Jules. Are you there? Jules?”

Delia was met, not with a dial tone, but with a static silence, the screen of her phone blinking like the metrical eye of the void at Track Eight: Telephone

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her, having ceased counting up their seconds, displaying the sum total of their conversation in numeric value, up to the last word that Jules had felt compelled to remain to hear.

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track nine

Crime Wave

two days passed shuddering though their development’s restlessness, anxious at the reduction of their moments’ instantaneous flash to the abstraction of a concentric and formulaic moniker: days. The days; two anxious blocks, undeveloped photos shaken, never quite coming into focus. For two days, Jules kept herself locked up in her room, her mind twitching through the labyrinth of obstacles, a trapped mouse, every turn leading to a hard obfuscation. In each scenario played out to its end, her home would be lost. There was no choosing not to lose. The only choice she could claim as her own was the manner of her losing. She couldn’t face the others in the house during those days for fear that they would recognize the decisions raging behind her flesh.

Mya also held her choices close, although hers were not plaguing her with such intensity. Either way, she would have a home.

The photo of the gray house she kept tucked in her bag, a Kansas address scrawled on the back. The longer Jules stayed locked in her room, madness’s odor creeping from below the door, the more enticing the photo appeared. it was a midwestern city . There was room to wonder, room

for disappearances and mistakes, room to get lost. It was a Midwestern city, spread wide over the decadence of Manifest Destiny.

The mighty Mississippi sliced the edge of Saint Louis like a dull blade, leaving jagged edges soggy, muddy shores on muddy water.

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From the shore, corporate office buildings attempted the illusion of a serious urban skyline, but the silence that filled the empty cement streets and echoing corridors spread too large to create an urban bustle throughout the daytime, waxed more of ghost town scenes.

When the night came, the corpse of downtown was transformed by those traveling from East Saint Louis, the steel mills of Granite City, and surrounding rural enclaves further out. Some drove up to three hours to try their hands at the riverfront casinos, hoping to get rich or at least forget for a moment the smell of steel fires burning open the endless sky, lonesomeness of cicadas, the predictability of motions of the high school sweetheart they married too young, and their many children who would do the same, tossing it all up for a moment’s notion of unforeseen wonderment as the ball bounced its way through the dealer’s roulette wheel.

Up under the office buildings, recently transplanted college students lighted the previously empty streets in reverie, tossing down dollar pitchers and licorice-flavored shots, hooting and howling like cowboys lost in an MTV music video as bleached blondes pulled up their shining skirts, pounded high heels on tables, and forgot their own names.

The downtown was alive on weekend nights, but other than the rock ’n’ roll teenagers—who lined up around the block for the latest underground band touring through Mississippi Nights— cocking their heads in disgust at the intoxicated clubbers, real Saint Louisans did not come here.

Further up from the river, in Soulard, old hippies and professional drinkers belted out rock and country songs from acoustic guitars on makeshift stages at open mics, below the perplexing garbage baroque ornamentation transplanted there from New Orleans so many generations ago. Further on still, to Tower Grove Park and South Grand, you could find, down one strip of Cherokee Street, a recently bloomed ‘Little Mexico,’ not acknowledged as such by most of the city’s residents. Down Grand ran an eclectic strip of rock bars, gay sex shops, dance clubs, and diners, 220

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punctuated at the end by a gritty coffee house, Moccabes, that served as the Mecca for all the well-built Sapphic women of the city who enjoyed coffee, cigarettes, and hours-long card games.

Over in the West End, fags, straight businessmen, and the richest women sipped martinis and lattes late into the night at the overpriced bars and cafés that ran in an almost perfectly syncopated line up and down the cobblestone streets and around the bustling fountain.

From the West End, continuing into the Loop, rich white women, seemingly out of place, sipped expensive wines, dotting the serious black jazz clubs like twinkling intoxicated starlights, all the way up to Blueberry Hill where Chuck Berry is still known to make surprise appearances. The Loop’s jazz scene sat precariously close to, but seldom mixed to a point of homogeny with the aspiring hip-hop and rap artists awaiting opening call to the stage of the Red Sea’s Ethiopian restaurant and performance space, or with the herd of punk rock and hippie musicians playing in the streets, avoiding the small enclave of Skinhead adolescents who could be found wandering in front of Vintage Vinyl.

Beyond this, Saint Louis is spread wider and wider, like an open hand, the tips of the fingers growing progressively further away from each other and from their beginning’s base. I am saying there is space, space for getting lost, space for hiding. This is no New York, no Paris, Milan, or even Chicago. Nature creeps in suddenly between things. Surrounding corporate buildings that appear in strips or secluded exclamations toward the periphery of the city, one might find an expansive field or a moment of forest occurring just beyond the lighted parking lots. the catholic worker ’ s house sits toward the north where the

city’s landscape is barely distinguishable from small town or country; and the theater, closer in, but in some partially abandoned tween space along Manchester, that endless, winding road that is so like a vortex one could fall into and never find a way out, if, that is, one is lucky enough to find it in the first place.

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There they are, in the space between things; queer where there is no there there, and no consolation either. Crusty and strange as anyone you’ve ever seen, people who could slip in and out of any of the neighborhoods, unquestioned or questioned thoroughly, it’s a tossup every time; light and dark, but all colored, crazily, sipping jug wine from jars, smoking cigarettes and other things in the dusty theater space they put three dollars down to enter, accompanied by the occasional brave tourists, but mostly by themselves. These are people who know each other well, attempting to live lives of odd purposes in a city that allows time and space for purpose.

Jules has come out of her den now. She is standing on the stage tossing unlit sticks between herself and Mya. They are cheering.

The torches light. Mya steps away. (Her juggling is adequate but is made more impressive when done upright on horseback.) Jules eats fire for them and dances it around herself, waving heat deep at their catcalls and applause. They are the circus space between things, the dancers, the singers, the short order cooks, metaphysical architects, the storytellers, the travelers, the environmental engineers, the squatters, the criminals. When Jules eats fire for them, they smile sweetly and applaud. behind the locked door of Jules’s room, later that night after the theater, the two sat hunched over a box of wires and switches. Jules fingered a diagram, her eyes squinting. “I just can’t quite get it right.”

Mya held out her able hand. “Let me see it.” She studied the map of parts. “Oh see, you got X in the spot where you marked N, here, see.”

“But then, where does the hook go?”

“Right here.” Mya unscrewed the small metal piece, turned it over, and attached it to the back side. “Then this wire goes, in this one. It’s not active yet?”

“No. It’s empty.”

“Well,” she clapped her hands, “there it is. It’s ready. All together now.”

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“How did you do that so fast?”

“I’ve always had a thing with solving puzzles. I didn’t know it would be good for this too.” when the door opened on Monday morning, the two women’s steps seemed perfectly in sync with one another, their mannerisms as if functioning with one mind between them. They sat down at the kitchen table across from Chris and Christie, sharing sideways glances, the tie between them a serious and dense binding.

“We haven’t seen you for a while,” Chris told them, glancing up from the newspaper and adjusting her glasses. “What made you decide to come and rejoin the living?”

“We have a show tonight,” Jules told her lightly, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

“Where’s that?” Christie asked. She was finishing the last of her breakfast. Mya stood to get the juice.

“Some fancy yuppies,” Jules answered, “are having a wedding anniversary on the roof of the City Museum.”

“That sounds nice,” Christie said, smiling sweetly. “I love the City Museum.”

“Yeah,” Jules continued, “but can you imagine how much it must cost to rent for the night? And on the roof ?”

“Are they paying you well?” Chris asked.

“They’re paying really well, actually, yeah. They said they had heard about Mya’s horse.” Jules leaned over her coffee and laughed. “Can you believe they actually asked if there was any way to get the horse up onto the roof ? These people are crazy!”

“I said to tell em we could fly Aryan up there if they get us a helicopter and lift,” Mya chimed in, shaking her head and giggling.

“Rich people are crazy!”

“What are you doing?” Christie asked.

“Basically the same dance as at the theater the other night.”

“Oh, that was really beautiful.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll add a few things. They have a piano player.

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I sent him the music. I guess they want some expensive bohemian ambiance or something.”

“Oh, whatever they want, your dancing is gorgeous,” Christie said patting Jules’s hand.

The doorbell rang, and Christie went to answer it while Chris turned the page of her newspaper. Jules sat sideways in her chair, perked, listening hard. She heard Christie’s muffled voice, “This property is collectively owned.” Then after a moment, “Yes, I’m one of the owners.” After a few more moments of silence, Christie returned to the kitchen. She was a tensed ball of energy. Her hands held a pile of papers and were visibly trembling. “Hunny! Hunny!” she almost shouted, “Chris! Come look at this.”

“What? What is it?” Chris stood quickly from her chair and went to Christie’s side.

“They’re coming to do a building inspection tomorrow morning, here . . . and,” she flipped through the papers, “the theater too.” Her voice was high, manic and cracking.

“What?” Chris took the papers from Christie’s hands. “They have to give us a week’s notice, I thought.” She sighed heavily.

“There’s no way we’re up to code.”

“What can they do?” Mya asked from the table. Jules gave her a sharp sideways glare.

“Well,” Chris said, still examining the forms, “best case scenario, we get a fine. Worst case, they condemn the building and kick us out.”

Christie looked at her lover pleadingly, her eyes wide and reddening. The house phone rang. Chris went to the wall and answered it. “Hello.” She listened readily. “No shit? Yeah, we got one too.”

Christie tapped her shoulder. “Who is it?” she whispered.

Chris held up a finger, motioning for her to wait. “Are you guys planning any protests or anything?” She shook her head. “No, we’re not either. I don’t know why they’re doing this now. Okay. I’ll call you back in an hour or so.” She hung up the receiver and turned to face the others. “Calibri and Bolozone both got summonses this 224

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morning too.” Chris put her hands on her hips and searched about the room, deep in thought. “They did this eight years ago. They shut down five collectives then, but we got them back open. But that was when we were all planning the big W.A.F. demo.”

“Do you think this could just be a regular building inspection?”

Christie asked.

Chris shrugged. “I mean, they usually give more notice than this, and come on, us, the theater and two other collectives?” Her cell phone rang in her pocket. She looked at the screen. “That’s C.A.M.P. So no, Christie,” she said impatiently, “it doesn’t look like this is just a normal building inspection.” She answered the phone gruffly, “Yeah, yeah, we got one too. Yeah, and Calibri and Bolo.

Look, I’ll call you back in a minute.” She put her phone back in her pocket and stood, taking another pointed look around the room.

Her eyes landed hard on Jules.

“I’m going to call Martin.” Christie said, patting Chris’s arm in near desperation. “Don’t you think we should just call Martin?”

“Who’s Martin?” Mya asked.

“He’s an ACLU lawyer,” Chris answered, still keeping her eyes hard set on Jules, who was sitting sideways at a lean in her chair as if preparing to duck from something that was about to be thrown at her.

“And what are you going to do?” she asked Jules, her voice deep and enraged. “You have any advice? You know anything about this?”

Christie looked from Jules to Chris. “What does she have to do with anything?” she asked.

Chris approached the table and leaned into Jules. “That’s what I would like to know.”

Christie leaned back against the sink, anxiety spread across her face. “What’s with you two lately? Is there something going on that I should know about?”

“No,” Jules said to Christie, “the fewer people who know details, the better.”

Chris pounded the table, “Oh, now you’re trying to protect her?

Now you care.”

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“It’s basic policy with direct action,” Jules said demurely, shaking her head. “If they ask her anything, she really won’t know.”

“Which action?” Christie asked, throwing her hands in the air.

“Is this about the Boeing thing?”

“I should have kicked you out,” Chris said to Jules. “But now it doesn’t fucking matter, does it?” Jules stood from her seat, taking Mya by the arm. “Where are you going?”

“I have to get ready for the show. I still need to work,” Jules said lowly, taking a passive stance. She headed toward the stairs, Mya at her side.

“Oh, this doesn’t faze you?” Chris hollered as she headed on.

“You might not be worried, but I think you should worry! You better just pack up your things,” Chris shouted at the top of her voice.

“We all better just pack up our fucking things.” Jules heard a chair crash to the floor as she made her way back up to her room. mya sat on the bed fidgeting nervously with her skirt. Jules locked the door then went to the closet, took out the black suitcase and laid it in the middle of the floor. “We need to do it tonight.

We don’t have any time to waste now,” Jules said. For the first time in days, her manner was steady and certain. Mya sucked on her bottom lip and looked toward the window. Tiredness shone in her eyes. It was the first time in her life that she felt truly tired, and she knew suddenly that she was finally an adult. She’d known terror, anguish, exaltation, hope; she’d slept and woken to restlessness that sometimes made way for boredom. She was weary of the constant struggle, and where boredom would have once been, she would now gladly accept rest, peace. There was no peace to grasp where she was sitting in her life. She looked out the window and shook her head as if telling the sunlight and blue sky “no,” knowing it would not accept her negation, but continue forcing its struggle of existence upon her, an endless pounding dance from which her feet were now beginning to feel the blister.

“What?” Jules asked. “You’re not hesitating are you? We talked

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about this. You were sure yesterday.” She walked up to Mya, took her by the chin and turned her to face. “Look at me. You’re making me nervous.”

Mya snapped her head away, but sadness weighted her face and words like heavy stone. “Naw, I aint hesitatin. I guess we gotta do what we gotta do. Always gotta do something we got no real choice about. Don’t matter much now, like you say. You just go on a get it ready.” She bit the tip of her thumb and, narrowing her eyes, looked again out the window to view the morning sky. “Tell me the plan again. I can’t keep it straight in my head.”

Jules nodded and went to laying their costumes out. “We do the show tonight, which is good, cause we’ll have lots of cash.

Then we get back here around midnight. You have to go get your bag packed, now. So, you come get your bag, then you get Aryan and ride her out down the field by Natural Bridge Road.

You just wait for me there in the spot I marked on the map, by the hospital.”

“But where you gonna be in case something happens?”

“You know where I’ll be. The Monsanto plant is out there a half a mile from the interstate along the highway. There’s a strip of woods there. It’s pretty secluded by the big vacant highway, and dark, with a lot of empty land around it. It’s perfect. So don’t worry. I’ll run in there, into the trees and cross through that way. I’ll meet you at the spot on the map I marked, then we just head to the train tracks and follow the tracks all the way out.” Jules laughed.

“Like cowgirls. Do you really think Helen will let me stay with her for a couple weeks till I find a place?”

“She said you could come visit sometimes if I move in with her.

She aint the type to go back on her word.” Mya rested her hands in her lap and looked to the floor dejectedly.

Jules leaned in and touched Mya tenderly on the cheek. “You don’t have to stay with her for long, you know? I mean, if you don’t want to.”

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Jules had never seen. “Jules,” she said squarely, “you sure you aint gonna blow no one up?”

Jules sat next to her on the bed, placing an arm around her reassuringly. “I told you, I’ll call the building from the payphone on the edge of the parking lot. I have three numbers for the plant, one of them is for security. I don’t want to kill the guard or anybody.

I’ll call and tell them there’s a bomb and to get out. I can see the entrance and backdoor from the payphone. When I see them run out . . . when I see everyone is all the way out and away, then I’ll hit the remote. Just like the Weathermen. I’ve done my homework.

No one is getting blown up.”

Mya kissed Jules on the cheek and stood. “Better not,” she said, then turned quietly and left the room. Her manner sent a cold chill all through Jules. Jules had not fully realized what it was she had so loved in Mya until this moment when she saw that light begin to flicker. Mya still looked so like a small child, a gothic doll. The past year and a half, Jules had watched her approach life with a vibrant spark, a lunging and leaping. Seeing maturation now growing in her as a gloomy resignation shuttered Jules with the feeling that she did love Mya more than she admitted to herself, that Mya was a person, perhaps more good, more special than herself, and she was making her less good, less special. But these thoughts were quickly chased away by the desire of her overwhelming ambition to retaliate against what was threatening her.

The papers had been served. James Michigan had made his move. The trigger finger in her brain itched to fire back. “The straps are coming out,” she said to herself, clapping her hands together and rubbing the heat out. She opened the black suitcase and gave its contents one final inspection. jules and mya waited behind the stage, preparing the torches.

Jules wore a sleek black unitard and tight black cap covering her neck and head revealing only her face, which Mya said made her look like a sexy ballpoint pen. On the stage, a thin man in a tuxedo 228

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tickled out jazz ballads from the baby grand that had been set up for the glitzy occasion. It was nine pm. Speeches had been made, dinner and champagne served. Jules had come up the back way avoiding the crowd, but kept peeking around the stage to get a look.

The two hundred glittering guests now sat at their tables eating cake or were out on the floor four stepping with their increasingly tipsy dance partners, adorned in suits and dinner gowns, shining up the ornamented roof below the starry night sky. “I think this is the fanciest party I’ve ever done,” she told Mya, “except for the Bread and Roses benefit for that arts foundation last year.”

She dipped the torch tip in kerosene and peeked around again.

“Damn, look at that table. They’ve got that huge cake and an ice sculpture and everything. I bet I could have gotten more money.”

“Who are these people?” Mya asked.

“I don’t know, some kind of businesspeople. They probably have their own foundation too. All these rich people have foundations.

It’s their twenty-year anniversary: Adam and Johanna Hale.” She snapped her tight black glove. “The husband is on the city planning commission, I know that. I probably could have doubled the price and they wouldn’t have batted an eye.”

The final notes of the jazz ballad sounded to light applause as the announcer introduced the fire dancer, which he said symbolized the passion of the honored couple. “Here’s to keeping the fire alive for another twenty years,” he said.

Jules appeared as an elegant thin black line on the stage. Mya stood behind her, torches in hand, a bucket of kerosene at her feet, awaiting Jules’s signal. She looked over the audience, over the black suits and women in pastel dresses, the bow-tied waiters making their way through with trays of hors d’oeuvres and champagne.

Over the last three days, it was as if someone had set a clock to ticking in Mya’s head, counting down the seconds to some pointed moment of finality. She thought the bomb, the explosion to come later in the night would be the alarm that the ticking was leading up to, that awful moment they were planning, after which, she Track Nine: Crime Wave

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understood, her life would be beginning anew, waking to a new moment, a living outside of the law, outside of society, outside of time. But looking over the audience and suddenly lighting upon the visage of a woman who was unarguably one of the most stunning women in the crowd of well-aged debutants, even with her mouth drawn tight in pensiveness as it now was, and whose eyes widened in near horror staring up at them, Mya was struck still through with cold silence. The clock in her head ticked its last tock, leaving way for dead stillness as her eyes caught the wide horrified gaze of Delia Michigan, who stood near the back of the dance floor just in front of the dining tables, frozen in place next to James who was only, from the distance he stood, beginning to recognize Jules’s face, obscured as it was by her costume.

Jules bowed, knelt down on one knee and lifted her head to face the audience. This was the cue to kill the lights. In the five-second count between the moment of facing the audience and the blackening of the lights, Jules found herself looking directly through the crowd at James and Delia, who stood centered at the back of the dance floor.

In the dark, the piano chimed the opening chords of a Gypsy love song. Jules held her hands in the air. Mya set three torches to flame, which burst open the browned-out stage, illuminating its inhabitants, the piano player, the fire dancer, and her weird assistant, a triad illuminated by flame. From behind her, Mya tossed the lit torches flipping through the air. Jules caught them and began juggling on one knee, then came to a standing position as the flames spun around her.

The piano player pounded the keys. When Jules danced, her mannerisms evoked a different personality, a wholly other character than was usually visible throughout her personage. The audience watched her, a thin line of elegance and control weaving herself between spinning fire. Something in Delia, from where she still stood still in shock, softened and burst forward from within her, a final pang of desire born from the visceral realization that 230

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she had known very little of the beauty the woman she had made her lover was capable of. James could not look at her for long. He shifted uncomfortably at his wife’s side, holding tightly to her arm, beginning to pull her away.

As Mya watched Jules dance in the fire, she silently pleaded that Jules might take something of her fire self through the dance and into the un-razed world. But she knew that she would not, that the control and confidence, that the ease and power with which she handled the flaming wands was, for whatever reason, inaccessible to her in all other moments of her life. Except for this symbolic act, Mya thought, Jules was not a fire dancer, she was fire.

With this thought echoing in Mya’s mind, Jules once again took a knee, three torches in hand, cocked her head up to the black sky, dipped the wands into her mouth and blew a final bursting dragon’s flame exploding from her like a fountain that burned out the last fuel from the torches, and from that bursting, darkness set again over the room that also broke open with applause.

When the lights came back on, Mya and Jules were standing side by side, bowing on the stage. The announcer was making his way back up. Jules stood after taking her final bow and looked around the room. Mya attempted to pull her away, but Jules freed her hand and casually approached the microphone that stood on the corner of the platform. Mya’s face paled and she stopped in place, knowing already what was coming next.

Jules took the microphone in her hand and scanned the faces of the audience members who had quieted and were watching her with lackadaisical anticipation. She tapped at it, causing some squealing feedback. “Is this on?” she asked through a breaking voice, still searching the room for her prey. She located them near the exit. James’s back was to her and Delia was frantically patting at his shoulders, but when he heard her voice, he spun round, clutching at his chest like a man who was experiencing the beginnings of a heart attack. “There you are,” she said. Mya clutched at the seams of her skirt, her heart pounding in her throat. Jules Track Nine: Crime Wave

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was finally doing what Mya had wished for, in a way, taking her confidence and control over volatile elements out of the realm of the symbolic and into the real world, but not in the manner Mya had hoped. “Ladies and gentleman,” Jules began, addressing the room with a gleeful swagger, “I would like to exercise my right to speak, and say how honored I am to have been included in this celebration of Adam and Johanna Hale’s love. I wish you another twenty years of keeping the fire alive in your marriage.” Gentle applause dotted the room. Jules placed her hand over her chest and bowed in the direction of the honored couple. “There is another anniversary coming up soon that I would terribly regret if I did not mention,” she continued, to the visible dismay of James. She nodded in his direction, a wicked satisfaction crossing her face and settling into an aggressive smirk. “So I would like to propose a toast also, to James and Delia Michigan.” She lifted her hand motioning to where they stood beyond the tables near the exit. James leaned against the wall, his hand on his chest. Delia took a step forward as if beginning to charge toward the stage, then thought better of it, stiffening as the attendants of the anniversary party turned to view them. A man near the stage handed Jules a champagne glass.

“Thank you,” she said, holding the glass in the air. “It’s hard to keep the fire alive in marriage. God knows.” She took a large gulp of the champagne. “But Delia and James have found their ways to keep the fire alive. In only three months from now, I will be celebrating the two-year anniversary of the day James Michigan paid me to fuck his wife in front of him. Now I don’t know for sure if it added any spice to their marriage, but it has definitely lit a fire under my ass.”

With that, she held her glass high in the air then tossed the remainder of its contents into her throat. When she looked again, James and Delia were gone and the crowd was turning red faced. A flaming roller coaster of gasping and murmuring had been set riding in waves around the room. The chubby white host approached her quickly, pulling the mic away from her, “Now listen here . . .”

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he began, but Jules had already turned and was making a hasty retreat. fire spreads almost as quickly as darkness spreads once fire has been snuffed out. Both are harbingers of confusion and blind panic, which carry iniquity’s babes in their ashen talons born by the rhythm of dyadic wings flapping black to flame, black to flame, up and down through the indifferent wind above the godforsaken cities of the worlds of ravishers.

Mya watched as the prophetic bird attacked Jules’s eyes, shining from flame to black, flame to black. Jules pulled her down the stairwell, in moments nearly catching a dead run. “Guess we aint getting paid now,” Mya tried, as Jules tore down the last two flights.

She wanted to tell Jules to slow down, to be calm, just to stop a moment, but she held her silence, breathless as a thing being suffocated in a razed windfall.

They reached the door. Jules threw it open quickly and darted into the street. Darkened warehouses and empty lots surrounded the museum, creating the image of an industrial desert. Tonight, an array of shining cars lined the south side of the building. Jules looked left to right frantically, noting the line of cars, and darted around the opposite corner, Mya following stealthily behind her.

“Let’s get to the train,” Jules said panting. “We don’t have much time now.”

Mya tried to keep her pace. “You aint still gonna do it? You can’t. Everyone’ll know it was you!” She grabbed at her shoulder and pulled her around, “Jules!” But she was cut off by the shouting of a man’s voice.

“Who the fuck do you think you are? You’re not going anywhere!” James was coming around the corner of the building, charging toward them, a smallish man in a black suit whose stance was suddenly that of a war general confronting a thick line of battle. Delia appeared behind him, jogging, her heels in her hand and wearing a rust-colored evening gown, her mouth pulled back in the

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awful struggle of a fish caught by a hook. Jules dropped her bags to the ground and moved Mya off with her arm, making her way quickly toward James. They met, bumping chests. Jules squared her shoulders at James, who burrowed his head down, readied as a fighting bull, his face red and bursting out the sides. “You listen to me, you little cunt!” He held his finger between them. Spit flew from his lips as he spoke. “You think you can do this to me? You are going to pay for this, you little bitch!”

Jules jolted her body forward, testing if he would flinch. He didn’t. This surprised her. She tried again as she hollered into his face. “It was you who hit me, motherfucker, and I hit you back tonight. Fucking deal with it.”

Delia squealed and grabbed James’s arms tugging at him. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “Just leave!” she squealed. “Let’s just go!” James pushed her back.

“You’re going to pay for this with things you didn’t even know you had to lose,” he shouted, squaring himself again against Jules.

She smirked aggressively putting her face up to his, shaking her head. “And you’re gonna burn, baby, burn,” she told him mockingly.

“You stay the fuck away from me and my wife!” he said firmly, poking his finger into her chest. Something large that had been burning for a while snapped loose when he touched her. She smacked his arm away and shoved his chest. It sent him back a step. “Come on, come out and play,” Jules said, cocky and swaggering as she quickly shoved him a second time. As he brought his hand up to push her away, she popped his jaw with her fist as hard as she could. He grabbed at his face and bent over. Delia howled and tried to jump between them, but again, James pushed her hard away and took a swing at Jules, also a jaw shot, which sent her instantly into a one-eighty spin, then to her hands and knees on the cement street strewn with pebbles and bits of broken glass.

Her back was to him and she was looking at the ground, regaining herself. James held his jaw in his hands panting. “Oh God, oh God!” Delia wailed.

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Throughout the entire scuffle, Mya stood where Jules had left her, watching the fight and feeling each word, each shove and smack as a dense ball dropped in her lap, as if the pendulums of the universe had ceased swinging and dropped the heavy weights of existence entirely upon her. She was there again, witnessing a new red moment, and although things had slowed down for her and she saw very clearly exactly what was to come next, she felt powerless to move to stop it. All she could do was wish in vain that that foot-long metal pipe had not been lying just inches away from where Jules had fallen. And when she saw that it was, all she could do was wish that Jules would not see it. And when Jules saw it, all she could do was wish that Jules would not reach for it. But when Jules reached for it, when she clutched it in her fist, Mya quit wishing forever. Those were the last wishes of her life. She would never again want for things to be other than they were, but accept the nonsensical dance of life appearing before her as both participant and active witness.

And it looked like a dance as Jules clutched the metal pipe and, in one motion, stood, spun round, brought the pipe high into the air then down into James Michigan’s sweet white skull. The pipe rang against the side of his head. That ringing sounded like a bell gonging in the eternal house of sadness.

His mouth went open, blood spurted out, and he crumpled to the ground. Delia let out a banshee squeal, then another and another, throwing herself upon him in a frantic hiccupping of unearthly screaming as she began shaking her husband, whose body was suddenly limp as a dishrag. Jules dropped the pipe to the ground. It bounced three times, sounding out wind chime noises against the pavement before rolling and settling.

Mya had begun backing away slowly into the alleyway, keeping her eyes on the blood running from James’s head, the horrible sight growing more distant with each step.

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of a person whose eyes had gone now from fire to polished blackness. Mya took four more quick steps back and was now completely submerged in the shadow provided by the alley. “Jules, run!” she shouted once, feebly, but Jules did not move from her place as she watched Delia howl and sob, caressing her husband’s face.

Delia turned her head to the sky and shouted for help from somebody, anybody. Around the corner, a group of partygoers appeared. Three men and three women stopped, paralyzed, viewing the scene. When Jules saw them, she snapped back to attention and turned, beginning to run. But two of the men leapt, quickly jogging after her, and tackled her to the ground. “Call 911!” one of the women shouted. Mya saw Jules’s face being smashed into the cement under the heavy weight of the two men. Their eyes did not meet. Mya turned and took off down the alley at a dead run, unnoticed by the crowd. by the time she reached the train, she was full up with the vision

of the blood. It had been so long since she’d seen through tiger eyes, but there it was again, everything red and slanting. She huddled on the floor in the corner of the metro car, to the dismay of the three other passengers, panting and growling, patting at the floor with her hands like claws as the blackness of the city rattled by.

She rushed out of the doors at her stop and made her way down the dimly lit street hissing at the peripheral noises, cloaked in a black tutu and halter top, five torches and a jar of kerosene resting in the bag slung over her shoulder. By the time she reached the yard, she’d devolved to crawling on all fours, making her way hissingly around the side of the house out to Aryan’s half-shed.

She crouched outside the entrance and growled low, the growling coming from deep inside her and rolling around until it made its way out. From beyond the small gate, the horse began to whinny and kick, startled at her owner’s transformation.

The sound of Aryan’s distress marked her. Aryan was perhaps the only thing now she had left to be good for, and the only thing 236

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that would be of service to her in the journey that somewhere inside her she was still conscious she had to make. As the horse began to whinny and kick, Mya quieted. She patted at her forehead with her hands like paws, and her eyes dilated back to humanness as her fists began to spread open back to hands. She stood and brushed herself off, grabbed an apple from the bucket, took the horse by the bit and patted her calm, feeding her the treat. “I’m sorry, girl,” she told her, her voice quivering. Mya felt the urge to cry, but she noticed there were no tears coming. Her sadness was too serious for tears. When Aryan had fully settled, she dropped the bags by the shed and entered the house.

It was dark inside. Everyone was either asleep or gone. She hoped they were sleeping. She needed to wake them, to warn them. She hurried quietly up the stairs and collected her two bulbous bags that sat prepared on her bed. Then she crept into Jules’s room, collected the black suitcase and made her way back out to the shed, where she dressed Aryan in her new birthday saddle and set her out a barrel of feed and several more apples. She patted the horse’s flank while she fed. “Eat up, girl,” she told her, “we’re gonna be going a long way now. We gotta start a long ride.” she hitched the bags to the saddle and mounted the suitcase

in front of her. With a heavy shake of the reins she ordered, “Heyawe,” and the white horse took off into the night.

She rode through the fields behind the houses, the white star above. “I guess they gonna make Jules pay,” she said to herself.

“Well, girl,” she patted Aryan as they galloped along, “I guess I gotta give her some pride to live off of while she’s in that place.”

The thought of Jules being locked up in jail liked to have crumpled everything inside her. But as she felt it beginning to crumple, she hardened herself around the feeling of the crumpling fist, and slowly felt her insides turning to something harder than she’d ever before felt inside her, and that night she knew she was changing.

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girl, and in that identity was preserved the notion that she was not a person who was a force in the world causing reaction, but a person reacting to outside forces, a person whom either things were done to or done for. But now as she rode feeling all of the violence and pain in her hardening to resilience, she thought of herself as a powerful hardened wildness, a muscled thing beginning to take shape, beginning to own its own power. Life was shaping her, sure, but she was beginning to reach out, hold it by the wrist, and tell it where to sculpt what and how.

“Yeah,” she whispered to Aryan, “We gonna finished what she started. Mmmmhmmm. They can’t get me no how. Even if Christie tried, and she won’t, aint no one can say my name anyway. And I guess that’s something huh? Got no one who can call me out. No real way to track my scent, hmm?” it was fifteen minutes riding to Monsanto. She figured she’d watched Jules go over the plan enough, she knew it as well as she needed. Mya tied Aryan inside the thick strip of woods that lined the field behind the plant. She pulled a blanket from her bag and cloaked herself, fully covering her head and body. The security cameras would only detect the dark silhouette of a small, monklike figure. She made her way through the field, stopping to open the suitcase. Taking out the flashlight, she inspected the contents. It looked like a perfect cartoon bomb, set up with innumerable wires and a ticking clock face. She took the remote out and placed it like a gun in her waistband, then flipped the switch on the side of the primary device. A small blue light on the side of the bomb lit up.

She rummaged in the pocket of the suitcase, searching for what was, to her, the most important piece of information, the phone numbers. She found the paper folded in the pocket, closed the suitcase, and continued on.

When she reached the lit parking lot, she spotted the payphone on the far west side. She crept up to the building, sat the suitcase against the wall, opened the jar of kerosene in her bag and began

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lining the side of the building with gas. The smell filled her nose, causing her to sneeze. Once the jar was empty, she scurried over to the payphone and uncrumpled the paper. She dropped in fifty cents and dialed the first number with trembling fingers. To her dismay, there was no answer. When she deposited the phone back to the receiver, the machine released her coins. She sighed heavily and tried to calm herself. It was well after one in the morning.

Even the highway was empty. Not one car had passed since she had arrived. She took the remote out of her waistband and held it carefully in her hand. It only had one button, large and orange in the center. She redeposited the coins and dialed the second number on the paper. It rang four times and she was about to hang up when she heard the deep bass of a man’s voice intone, in a slow, Southernish drawl, “Hullo.”

“Hello, yeah, um, how many people in there?”

“Excuse me?” he asked, slowly. “Who, well now, who this be?”

“It don’t matter none who this be. Y’all in Monsanto, right?”

“Ummm, yeah. That’s right.” He said it casually, too slowly for the situation as if perhaps they were two happy strangers meeting at a diner.

“Well, you need to get out now. There’s a bomb in the building and you got about thirty seconds to get out or get blown.”

“What you talking about now?”

Mya stomped her foot. Why did the security guard have to be her slow uncle? She could tell just from the few sentences exchanged that he was a person who was gonna take his time to get where he needed to go, even if his life depended on him getting on someone else’s time. She tried to keep it simple and emphatic.

“How many people in that building right now?”

“Well now—” she could almost hear the molasses creeping as he thought about it, “there’s just me in this here building right now.”

“You sure bout that?”

“Yes ma’am, I’m sure.”

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She turned her head away and cleared her throat. “Listen, I am telling you I am about to blow this building sky high, and if you wanna wake to smell the pretty flowers tomorrow, you will get out of this building RIGHT NOW!” “Well hell! Are you serious?” He had finally begun to sound concerned.

“I am dead serious! I got no beef with you. It’s that damned building I want to blow, so get your sorry ass out on the street or I guess I’m gonna have to take you with it!” She heard a series of muffled noises, and after about thirty seconds, she saw the burly security guard stumbling out of the front door, the cordless phone still held against his ear, looking about him unsuccessfully for the source of the perpetration. “Can you still hear me?” Mya asked.

“Yes I can, but where are you?”

“That don’t matter. But you still too close, now get on back.” He took a few stumbling steps back, still looking around him. There was an entire parking lot between them.

“Where you at?” He seemed to be expecting her to show up right at his side.

“Nope, that’s not good enough. Get on all the way across the street,” she told him. He was going away, but not fast enough. “We got ten, nine, eight,” she began counting down, which worked finally to light the fire under his ass. He began imitating a run the best he could until he was across the highway and making his way waddlingly into the opposite field.

Mya nodded, hung up the receiver, and took a few steps back.

She held the remote up over her head and pressed the thick orange button, the only button.

She did not know exactly how the bomb worked, that the levers ticked one diabolical domino into another within the contraption, like the events leading up to this moment, releasing a liquid into a potent powder until the volatile pressure could no longer be contained. She did not wince as the BANG! rang out through the air, sending up debris from the wall in a cacophony of smoke and 240

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flame. She was relieved at the sight of it. The destruction of the bomb served to release an anger and sadness in her that had also become too hot for tears.

The burly guard shouted and fell back onto the ground, startled at the sight, his hands above his head shaking frantically in the air. The bomb had only taken out a portion of the side wall. The flames were catching the kerosene and licking at the remainder of the wall. She guessed it didn’t matter that it hadn’t taken the whole building. Christie was always saying how the symbol of the act is more important than the consequence of the action. She wasn’t sure if Jules would agree, but she knew, wherever Jules was, over the next few days she would hear about this, and it would at least give her some satisfaction in that cold place where she was probably going to be waiting for a long, long time.

As the small fire took over, Mya turned her hooded figure and made a mad dash back through the field. Beyond it, Aryan stood shaded in the thickness of the strip of woods.

She untied her from the tree, mounted the white horse and took off into the night, the fire receding into the distance. They made their way through the field and down, beside a long strip of trees that ran for miles along the railroad tracks and the all but abandoned tween spaces connecting America to America, carrying its cargo in decadent freights, as if flickers of the past appearing along cross-sections of subconscious paths. These invisible roads would carry her, mounted on Aryan, into her strange and unforeseeable future.

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S i d e tw o If you see Saint Annie Please tell her thanks a lot I cannot move My fingers are all in a knot I don’t have the strength To get up and take another shot And my best friend, my doctor, Won’t even say what it is I’ve got.

—“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by Bob Dylan

track one

Send Me an Angel

I know there are stars out there other places where you can see them when you walk outside. They’re just there smashing you in the face, out in those places where night is dark, making you look up and remember something you can’t really remember, probably because you never knew it, because it is something that was happening about you before you were, and will be happening about you after you are; reminds you something about your mortality and makes you feel better about your place and all the things that are happening to you that seem so significant, you realize they signify nothing in the big scheme of things. It takes the weight off when you realize it doesn’t mean that much when you look at those stars up there. Places out there like that, I get the feeling there are grandmas and things that hold you on porches and tell you silly stuff about the stars being angels looking down on you. Every kid in those places, I guess, must think they have their own special angel just for them. And maybe they really do, because maybe there is someone praying for them and maybe, after all, those stars really are angels. But I wouldn’t know. i don ’ t have any stars . I don’t have any angels. I’m gonna have to go ahead and be one myself, I think. That’s what I think.

I have to be my own angel. I read that on a card the other day at the CVS while I was waiting in line. It said, “Be Your Own Angel.” It was really beautiful the way the silver glitter letters were sparkling in the fluorescent lights, and everything smelled nice like flower perfume. I snatched it and put it in my pocket when no one was looking. I only had the exact money for the last of the Sudafed they

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sent me for, so I had to snatch it. I’d already gotten two boxes of Sudafed at Duane Reade and two more at Walgreens. The CVS cashier gave me a hard time about buying two boxes at once, but usually they let me get two, so for a second I thought maybe if she only let me take one I could buy a bunch of those cards with the extra money and cover the walls of my room with them. But then I knew it would get noticed if there was money missing, and then there’d be trouble, so I just kept pushing and she let me buy both boxes and I got away with my one snatched card.

My wall is already covered in all kinds of angels. When you walk in, it looks like heaven. Well, a water-stained heaven. It’s taken a while to get enough angels to cover the walls, and the house is moldy with the humidity in the summertime, so some of the paper angels I glued up there have started to get yellowish and dry and are peeling. That’s why I wanted all those cards, so I could cover my room new, all with the same bright, clean sparkling, angels, and it would look like real wallpaper, not just like some things I’ve stuck on the wall over the years. i walked home along Flatlands Avenue, like always. I’m supposed to stay along the big streets so nothing happens to me.

Usually I do, even though it’s depressing. Everything looks like a prison. The bottoms of the buildings are all painted this horrible greenish bluish color, and where there aren’t buildings, there are abandoned lots that have grown up like fields. That should be nice really, kind of like the country. But somehow it’s nothing like the country at all. It’s worse than just cement. Maybe because the weed lots are all littered and empty and fenced in with rusty chain fences and smell like dirty diapers and gas. I know this is supposed to be New York City still, but it sure doesn’t feel like it way out here. I know what New York City is really like. It’s about forty minutes on the train. I’m not supposed to, but when they’re all out like busted lights from burning too hard too long, I gotta get out of there sometimes. I take the J train. I hop the turnstile and go.

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Even when the workers are there, they’ve never said a word to me.

I guess cause I’m a kid.

My mom’s boyfriend, Toni, said they keep poor people down by putting the trains above ground. He said that the trains get deeper down the richer the neighborhoods get, and you can tell a poor neighborhood because the trains are twenty feet in the air. That’s one of the ways they keep us feeling low, he said, by making us see that we are lower even than the subway tracks. But that’s the only thing I like about where I live.

The J train’s above ground, so I can ride it all night and get a good view of the city and everything from up there. On bad nights I ride it all the way into the first stop in Manhattan, right after it crosses the bridge into Delancey Street where it first goes underground. Then I get off, cross over and go back, just crossing the Williamsburg Bridge like that, over and over. It’s my own personal tour train. It looks like a postcard from the bridge, the city all lit up under the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, which is a new surprising color every time and I never know what for, all sparkling and reflecting, making a second city in the water below.

But that night I snatched the card, it was already too late. I wasn’t even thinking about getting on the train, just going home, walking on Flatlands Avenue like I’m supposed to, with the new angel card in my pocket. I wasn’t thinking about anything except where exactly I was going to put the card, when I saw Aladdin coming down the street. The look on his face told me he was going to be trouble. He was walking with this swagger he gets when he’s about to do something crazy, kind of like a demented John Wayne swagger, but unlike John Wayne, his pants are not super tight.

They’re always falling down. They hang way down in the back so you can see his boxers and he’s always holding on to his beltline in the front to keep them up even though he’s always wearing a belt with a big gold genie lamp buckle, which I guess he got because of his name.

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me, even though he has pet names for me. He calls me Snowflake and Snow-bunny, Ghost Whisperer, Angel Dust, the Glass Menagerie, the Faggot Mime (he’s only said that once really, so I guess it’s not totally a pet name), M&M, and his favorite, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. He’s totally black and I’m lighter than him, obviously. I guess he thinks I might as well be white. My dad was mixed and my mom’s totally white. Also, Aladdin’s sixteen and I’m thirteen, which might not seem like that big of a difference, but with me it really is, because I look a lot younger than I am. I think I might have actually stopped growing a few years ago. But Toni tells me that a lot of boys do that for a few years, and then suddenly they shoot way up like Jack’s beanstalk. That’s what he says he’s sure is going to happen with me.

Aladdin and I are supposed to be like brothers now. But like I said, I think he hates me. Still, he does stick up for me in a weird way. Whenever anyone else picks on me or tries to beat me up, he lets them have it. He’s protective of me about other kids. He even punched one kid square in the face last year after he found out the kid took my money and books from me. Aladdin saw me sitting on the stairs after school. I was crying and had a black eye. He asked what happened. I told him. He made me go looking around with him for the kid. When we found him, he took the kid by the collar and made him give me my stuff back. Then he told the kid to apologize to me. The kid spit in his face instead. Aladdin punched him hard on the cheek then. The kid started squealing and ran away, and none of the other kids have picked on me much since then, except Aladdin. He’s harder on me than they ever were, so that’s why I’m kind of confused about how he really feels about me. Maybe it is like having an older brother. I don’t know.

I knew it was going to be trouble right at first when I saw him, because he didn’t call me by any of my pet names when he was walking up to me on the sidewalk, he called me by my real name.

“Gabriel. Hey, Gabriel, come here.”

When he said that, I stopped dead. Like I said, I knew there was 246

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gonna be trouble and something in me thought about running. He was still a few yards away. I might have had a chance. On my left was a fenced-in weed lot, but on my right was the highway. I could have dashed across it into the side street. But by the time I got to a point to decide for sure, he was upon me.

In the Harry Potter books, people are always coming upon something. “And then they came upon a locked door,” for example.

People are always coming upon people and stumbling upon things in those books. For a long time, I thought that I was going to turn out like Harry Potter, but with angels instead of witches. I thought they were going to fly into my house one night, maybe my thirteenth birthday, which was just last month. I thought they were going to fly in and tell me that I’ve always secretly been a magical angel and take me with them. But they didn’t. I guess they won’t.

I started to get the feeling for sure that nothing like that was ever going to happen just after my birthday.

My mom got me this really nice silver angel ornament for my birthday that I hung above my bed. I loved it. It was heavy and real silver and shining. But just three weeks after my birthday, she got low on money and had to take it to the pawnshop. It’s there in the little glass case. I go by and look at it as often as possible to make sure they haven’t sold it. I’m saving up leftover change to get it back. I was getting close, probably just another week or two if they kept sending me on those Sudafed runs, and I could have had it. aladdin was wearing a bright blue T-shirt and holding his

gold lamp belt buckle to keep his pants from falling. He came up to me fast on the sidewalk, put his hand on my shoulder and looked around nervously. I’m not sure what for. “Hey, Gabriel,” he said, “I need you to do me a solid.” He was talking to me like I was one of his friends. This worried me. We were alone on the sidewalk, just a few blocks away from the strip mall that was mostly shut down now. The highway was busy, as usual, and I could see the nervousness in his eyes in the passing headlights. When he gets really upset, Track One: Send Me an Angel

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he looks kind of sleepy. His lids get heavy and his whole face gets slack. That’s what he was looking like then. He looked me in the eye under his heavy lids. “I really need a favor, okay?”

I shifted under his hand and held tight to the straps of my backpack. “What favor?”

He leaned in close. “Do you still have the money they gave you?”

My mouth dropped open. I shook my head no. A man walked by, some old fat guy. He was staring at me really hard, actually turned his head as he was walking and walked almost backward to keep looking at me. Finally Aladdin hollered at him, “What are you looking at?” The man turned his head away. “That’s right, keep walking,” Aladdin told him. He still had his hand on my shoulder. He leaned down close. “If you stopped dressing this way, people would leave you alone, you know?” I just stared at him and nodded. “Jesus,” he sighed, kind of annoyed.

He was talking about the halo and the wings. They’re not much, but they’re all I have. I have these pink and silver wings made from wire and lace I was wearing, that I always wear, that I got in an after-Halloween sale last year. They’re old and worn now, bent.

And I have this silver halo thing that used to actually sit on a wire so it looked like it was hovering above my head, but Aladdin broke it, so I just started wearing it right on my head, smashing my hair down. It still looks like a halo, but also like a foil head band. Aladdin says it makes me look like a hipster, or like a gay Karate Kid. Aladdin broke it because of what my mom said. It made me really mad at the time, but now I think he thought he was doing it for my own good.

It was six months ago. Me, Toni, Aladdin, and my mom were sitting at home. My mom and I were fighting about something, I don’t remember what, and I yelled at her that I wanted to go back to my foster family in Yonkers. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t even remember them really. I’ve been with three foster families.

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few months old till just after I was one. I only know that because my mom told me about it, about how They took me away from her a few months after I was born. Then They gave me back to her.

But They took me away again when I was five and six and gave me back when I was seven. I was with two foster families then. I only remember the second one, kind of. I remember a kiddy swimming pool with turtles on it and a barbeque in a backyard and people saying Yonkers. When I was seven, They gave me back to my mom.

She was good then for a couple of years. She started working, cleaning in a hospital, and it was just us, and she wasn’t drinking or drugging then for a while at all. I thought maybe it was going to stay that way. But it didn’t. She lost her job and couldn’t seem to find another one. After a few months of not getting a job, she stopped looking and started partying a lot. Then she started having all these boyfriends.

She was planning on getting married to a different guy every week for a while. They were all jerks. There were at least four motorcycle guys. I think one of them was actually a Hell’s Angel.

You would think I would’ve liked that, but I didn’t. I remember all these guys pushed me the same way. They pushed on my chest.

They were just trying to push me away, but I always fell down on my butt. They pushed me when they took my mom to the bedroom and I tried to follow. I don’t know why I did that, but I always did. When I did, they would turn and tell me to stay out and push me by my chest. I can see all my mom’s boyfriends in a row, like in a slideshow, all their hairy or hard faces as they push me down, away from my mom’s bedroom, and me falling on my butt. That’s how I remember them.

Toni never did that. I like Toni better than all of them. She’s been with him for a long, long time, like two years now. I don’t know why he’s with her. I think she’s bad for him. She talked him into starting this selling business but instead of selling anything, they’re always blazed on whatever they’re making. She’s always yelling at him over nothing and she’s starting to look bad.

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I’ve been liking my mom less and less for a while, so that’s why I said what I said when we were fighting. I wanted to make her feel as bad as possible. I yelled, “I want to go live with my foster family in Yonkers!”

She poked her face right in mine and got this look she gets like she just wants to vomit on everything in the world and said really meanly, “Oh, you think it’ll be better in Yonkers?”

And I screamed, “Anything would be better than living with you!”

Then she said, “Even if you went to Yonkers, they would still beat you up there too, cause you’re such a faggot. I’ll bet those people up there are the ones who made you a faggot.”

I yelled back at her, “You’re the faggot, mom!” She smacked me hard on the cheek, then she started laughing and saying that I didn’t even know what faggot meant. “You don’t even know what that means and you are one!” she shouted, laughing. She was drunk or high on something. “Maybe you’re just a retard! You know what the difference between a fag and a retard is?” I folded my arms.

“Lipstick!” She hollered and started laughing again. “I made that up!” she told Toni. He shook his head and looked down. “At least you not wearing lipstick, yet,” she said, not laughing anymore but angry again, and went across the room to get a cigarette.

Aladdin got mad then and yelled at Toni, “Are you going to let her talk to her son that way? You’re going to stand there and let a woman disrespect the men this way?”

I think that’s so weird, cause Aladdin has always been calling me and everyone fags, but he’s also been on this weird kick lately about how men are treated by women. Toni said it’s part of his teenage rebellion, that he thinks he’s Jamaican but he’s not, he’s Brooklyn. He’s always telling him, “Hey kid, you’re from Brooklyn, remember?” I heard Aladdin telling Toni, when my mom wasn’t there that he should remember he’s from Africa, and why is he with this white trash bitch?

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qualities, that even villains in stories often have some redeeming qualities. Lately, my mom has fewer and fewer redeeming qualities. The only one who seems to like my mom at all right now is Toni.

So Aladdin yelled at Toni, “Are you going to let her talk to her son that way?”

Then Toni said to my mom, “You shouldn’t talk that way to your kid. That’s going to fuck him up.” Then my mom and Toni started fighting, cause she said she was going to talk to her kid any damn way she pleased.

Aladdin said, “Let’s get out of here, come on.”

Aladdin and me went down to the front and sat on the stairs outside.

At first we just sat there, not saying anything for a while. Aladdin picked up a weed and chewed on it, then he found half a cigarette in his pocket and smoked it. “They’re so fucked up,” he said finally.

“You’re mom’s a fucked up bitch, you know that?”

I said, “I know. She’s a crazy whore.”

He said, “Whoa, I didn’t know angels were allowed to talk that way.”

I felt kind of guilty then and thought he was right. A real angel wouldn’t talk that way even if the angel was mad. It’s hard to be angelic sometimes.

I think Aladdin was trying to have a heart-to-heart with me.

He said, “What are you now, like twelve?” I nodded. “Well, you gotta stop wearing this weird costume. I know you’re doing some kind of Lady Gaga thing, and I can get with that, but you have to find a new style, kid. Something more intimidating. Maybe a devil or something?” He looked at me like he was negotiating with a crazy person. He never got it, never will. Maybe I don’t even get it. I just like angels. That’s all I’ve ever liked except books. I like angels. That’s what I want to be. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. In the fifth grade, when they made us all write essays about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I wrote an essay about angels.

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It’s more than just my angel costume though that bothers people about me, I know. Even strangers notice how . . . small or, well I’m just kind of . . . smallish. I don’t know what the right word is, but there’s something about me that seems very young that people, even strangers, notice.

The woman at the library last year tried to get me to rent out Peter Pan. I told her I already read that when I was little. She asked me how old I was now, like she was making fun of me. I told her I was twelve, and that I read a lot, that I’ve read most of the kids’ books there, so I was ready for adults’ books. She said, “Oh I see, well then. Twelve, huh? You are an old man.” She looked around, then she asked if I thought I was really ready for a real adults’ book. I told her that I sure was. She gave me this book called The Tin Drum. It’s about this kid who stopped growing, but he made himself stop growing. I guess she was trying to tell me something with that. I didn’t make myself stop growing. I want to grow. But after I read that book, I started to feel like I had stopped growing.

Like my body did it without asking me. I mean, sometimes I look at myself and I think that my body is not really that much smaller than other kids my age, but something about me just seems smaller.

It could be because it’s becoming angelic. I’m pretty sure angels look more fragile, and that’s what’s happening to me, even though people think I’m crazy when I say things like this, I might not be growing like a normal boy. I’m just growing like a normal angel.

But that’s also why people call me a fag. The first time I took that seriously was when I first moved out here. I was eleven and there was this kid at school here who was twelve and he was much bigger than me. He’s much bigger than everybody. His name is Elliot and he’s really fat. His clothes make him look like a packed sausage. He has this crazy pair of super tight purple pants he wears that make him look like a packed purple sausage. When I first moved here, he was watching me all the time, following me around the halls of the school and saying weird things to me. Then one day I was late making the bell and there was no one but us in the hall. He got 252

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me in the corner. He punched me in the stomach and had me up against the wall. He told me that I had to meet him after school that day behind the strip mall and that I had to kiss him or he was going to beat me bloody. Then he made kissy faces at me and told me I had pretty lips, and twisted my wrist and left.

So I went and met him behind the strip mall after school. My legs were shaking. He was waiting there for me. He was wearing his weird purple pants that day, waiting all fat behind the building trying to look mean. It was just him. There was no one around, no one anywhere who could see us back there. He made a fist and started punching it into the palm of his hand. “So what’s it gonna be?” he asked really tough. I was standing a few yards away feeling really scared. I nodded yes. He said, “Then get over here, princess.” I came over and stood against the wall, facing him. He didn’t even stop to look at me or anything. He just grabbed the back of my head and kissed me.

He kissed me really hard, like he was attacking me with his big mouth. Everything about him was fat, even his tongue, which was pushing all over my lips and in my mouth. Then he was pushing his fat stomach against me and he grabbed my butt and told me I had a nice ass. He kissed me and stuff for like a full five minutes before he pushed me away and leaned with his back against the wall, kind of panting. He wiped his mouth with his arm like he’d just had a big glass of milk. He didn’t say anything. I stood there, motionless. He looked at me from the side once, and he looked kind of nice for that second. He was looking at me like he actually really liked me. Then he leaned over with his hands on his knees and shook his head. “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm,” he said, “you sure do have a pretty little mouth.” Then he stood up and said, “Faggot.” Then he punched me hard in the stomach and ran away.

Not fast, kind of waddling running, because he’s fat.

Not too long after that, I got my halo and wings and started wearing them all the time. I’d always known I wanted to be an angel. But after that, I figured, like Oprah said, there’s no better time than the present to live your dreams.

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aladdin didn ’ t like it at all when I started wearing them.

A few weeks after I got the halo and wings, when we were sleeping (his bed is across the room from mine), he got into my bed in the middle of the night. He was like fourteen then, almost fifteen.

He’s a lot bigger now than he was then. There’s a huge difference between fourteen and sixteen, at least for him. I was still just getting to know him then. He got on top of me his knees by my stomach, pinning me, and put my arms up over my head. I had been sleeping and he scared me a lot when he did that. I woke up to find him on me, his face right against mine. I opened my eyes and gasped.

He said, “Shhhh . . . be quiet.” He looked me up and down. “You like this?” he asked. I shook my head no. He said, “Good. Better not! Cause I’m not sharing my room with some queer in a Halloween costume.” I shook my head no again. He didn’t move. He seemed really upset. He said, “Snowflake, you didn’t do it with Elliot, did you?” I shook my head no. He said, “Better not, ever.

That’s what some kids are saying, you know that?”

I shook my head no and said, “Aladdin, I didn’t!”

He said, “Good. I’ll tell them he’s a lying freak.” Then he got real close to my face and said, “You better be telling the truth or I don’t know what.” He rolled off me and went back to his bed. When I was about to go to sleep again, he said, from across the room, like he was thinking out loud, “Damn, Snow White, even if you are going to be queer, at least be queer with David Hasselhoff or Prince or someone like that.

Elliot, man? Come on! He’s disgusting. You look better than all that, you know.” A few minutes later he started snoring.

Aladdin always confuses me. so we were sitting outside on the stoop talking bad about my mom being bad and yelling at me. I was remembering what he had told me that night in my bed, way back, when he suggested that I be a devil instead of an angel, or something else more intimidating.

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Aladdin was smoking his half cigarette. He told me, “Why not be a devil or something?”

I guess I shouldn’t have said what I said then. I looked kind of dreamily at the sky and I said, “Why would I be a devil? There are enough devils in the world. I want to change the world to angels instead. We have to be the change we want to see in the world.” I started biting on and sucking my thumb then and told him, not even really thinking about it, “I read that on a postcard.”

I remember that I had my thumb in my mouth, because as soon as I said that, he popped me up under the chin which made me bite it hard. It hurt. I shook it and screamed, shocked. “What the hell?”

He stood up, really mad and was waving his arms. “What the hell? What the hell yourself, Gabriel.” He stuck his thumb in his mouth and mocked me, “I read that on a postcard.” He made the words sound like baby talk. “You know what you sound like?” he screamed at me, bending down to my face, “You sound like . . . Man, I don’t even know what you sound like.” He smacked me on the back of the head. “There are no fucking angels in this world, Snowflake.

You’re right. They’re all devils, and if you don’t want them to kill you, you gotta be a devil too. You get it?” I wanted to cry then, but I didn’t. “God! I’m trying to help your fucking ass and you’re quoting postcard clichés. Man you must be a fucking retard after all.” Then he grabbed the halo off my head, smashed it up and threw it at me. “It’s time to grow up, Gabriel. Get a new look and act sane! Phhhhhh.”

He walked away from me then and didn’t come back till late in the middle of the night, to sleep. When he saw me the next day with what was left of the halo smashed down over my hair, he just shook his head and sighed, “Jeeeeeesus!” Since then, for the last few months, he hasn’t really been talking to me or dealing with me much except picking on me sometimes. He’s getting older, has a girlfriend and has been gone a lot, out living his own life, leaving me alone, until, well, until he came up to me on the sidewalk.

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he walked up like John Wayne, looking nervous. He asked

me if I had the money. He looked really like he wanted to vomit. I told him I didn’t have the money anymore, that I spent it already.

“You spent it already?” he asked. I nodded. The hand that was on my shoulder grabbed the collar of my shirt and tugged me in. He put his nose up to mine. “I really need a favor, okay?” I couldn’t do anything. I was just hanging there, limp in his hand. “What did you buy with it?”

“Sudafed.”

“How much?”

“Like, six boxes.”

He sighed and shook his head, annoyed. “That’s all? Fucking tweakers.” He looked around again like he was expecting something. “Okay, give it to me.”

“What? No. I can’t. It’s not mine.” I tried to pull away from him, but he held tight.

“I know whose it is. Just give it to me.”

I screamed, “No!” and kicked him in the shin. It didn’t hurt him. He shook me by the collar and held me away.

His eyes were very desperate. He bent down to me and said in a voice that sounded like he might start yelling or crying any second, “Look, dude, I need a favor, okay? Give me the damned Sudafed.

Don’t make this hard, Angel Dust.”

I couldn’t help it. I started crying. “If I don’t bring it back, they’ll kill me.”

He shook me again. “Stop crying. They won’t kill you. They’re too fucked up to do anything. Just tell them you got jumped. What’s your mom going to do, smack your hand?”

“What do you even need it for?” I was hiccupping.

“Would you stop! I got real problems, grown up problems. I need everything I can get right now; money or shit to sell, whatever. I’m not going back there, ever. I’m out. Now come on. I looked out for you when you needed it, didn’t I? Just give it to me.” He grabbed my backpack. I smacked at him and pulled on 256

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it, but he’s a lot stronger than me. He grabbed my backpack and pushed me away, hard. I stood there, defeated, watching him rummage through. He got the boxes of Sudafed and shoved them in his pockets. I couldn’t help thinking, I should have just bought the angel cards instead, cause now I was going to get it anyway for having nothing to bring back to them. He zipped up my bag and handed it back to me. I took it and stood there with my head hanging, trying not to cry anymore.

Aladdin looked really upset. He shoved at my shoulder like patting me. “Man, come on. It’s okay. You’re just a kid. What do you got to worry about? They’re not gonna do anything to you.”

I raised my eyes to him. “Maybe you can come just to make sure. Just tell them you chased the guy who jumped me away or something, but he got away with the drugs, so they believe me.”

He laughed at me. “Yeah, I got it in my pockets though. They might notice that.”

“Please!”

“No, dude. I’m never going back there.”

I wiped my eyes and sniffed. “What do you mean? You’re not coming back home?”

Mom and Toni had been having an ongoing “party” for four days. Aladdin left two days into it and hadn’t been back since. He got in an argument with Toni before he left, but I didn’t think it was that serious. He’d been fighting with Toni a lot the last few months. He was staying out for days and days and wouldn’t tell anyone where he was. Those days though, I understand why he left. There were so many people at our place all the time, just coming and staying for hours and then leaving, making way for a new set of people to come and stay, going on and on like that. It was making us crazy. I wasn’t sure when it was going to end. They’d sent me for the Sudafed to keep that party going. They burn it down with other stuff and make powder that they snort to party.

I was really scared of going back alone, and without anything to show for the money they gave me. I was scared more than ever.

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“Don’t tell them you saw me, okay?”

I knew I couldn’t tell on Aladdin. I don’t know why, I just couldn’t. “When are you coming back? Where are you going?”

Even though Aladdin didn’t talk to me much anymore, he was the only one in the house who was on my side, and the only one who could stand up to my mom and keep those people out of my room.

The last two days after he left were awful. I was just waiting for him to come back the whole time.

“Home? Going home? Nope. That’s not home. That bitch really fucked my dad up, you know that?” He looked at me like my mom was my fault.

“Just come back with me.” I was crying again.

“Get ahold of yourself.” He patted my shoulder and actually looked sad for me. “I aint going back there, Gabriel. Not now. Not ever. I got my own stuff to take care of. My girl thinks she might have one on the way. I gotta get some money together and try to do right. You know what I mean? I gotta do right.” He nodded when he said this, and looked almost happy and very determined. “Take care, man. I’ll see you around. Don’t let them give you any shit.”

He started to walk away, but I jumped on him. I threw my arms around him, around his waist, and started crying loud. I told him, “No, don’t go. Don’t go. Take me with you. Can’t you take me with you?”

He held his hands in the air and said, shocked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I kept crying, “Take me with you. Take me with you!”

He walked backward, dragging me along for a few feet, then he tried to push me off, but I was holding tight. He pried at my hands, which were clasped around him. “You’re acting like a damned dog!” he said. “Stop whimpering!” He finally got my hands loose.

When he did, he held them above my head then shoved me down so hard I fell on my butt. “Get off me, peckerwood!” he said, and then he ran away down the sidewalk.

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mouth just opened and shouted out, super loud, really pitifully, “Aladdin! Aladdin, don’t go!”

I opened my teary eyes. I could still see him several yards down the sidewalk appearing in the passing car lights then becoming a shadow. When I screamed like that, he slowed, then turned around and stood looking at me. He hollered loud enough for me to hear him. “I’m sorry, Angel Dust. But I gotta go. It’ll be all right. You’ll get your ticket to heaven.” Then he disappeared around the corner.

I sat on the sidewalk crying for a long time before I got up the courage to get up and go back home. my knees were shaking all the way up the stairs. I could

almost hear them rattling. It was a long walk. We live on the fifth floor. I don’t like to take the elevator. It smells like piss. The fluorescent light in our hall was flickering. I stood outside the door, listening. I could make out a jumble of voices, but I couldn’t tell whose they were or what they were saying. I tried to make sure my face looked really upset, but I guess I didn’t have to try too hard to fake it since I was so scared. I whispered a few times, “I was jumped. I was jumped,” trying to make sure it sounded real and dramatic enough. Then I opened the door slowly, cracked just enough, slipped in sideways and stood against the wall inside the living room.

Toni was sitting on the couch next to his younger sister, Anna.

She didn’t visit very often, a few times a year. I always liked her.

She was always really sweet to me. She had a beer in her hand and a very serious look on her face. On the chairs across from Toni and Anna, I saw some muscled guy with a baseball cap who I’d never seen before who was black, and then by him was a fat white woman in a tank top that was way too tight, and bad hot pink lipstick, who I had met a few times, because she was the girlfriend of Kenny, and he was sitting in the chair next to her.

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anything remotely like him. Mom has always said that Kenny’s our cousin, but I don’t understand how he can be my cousin and her cousin too and I’ve never met anyone else I’m related to that he’s related to. I hate Kenny. He has a son who is a real, actual retard, not the way Aladdin called me, but with real brain damage, and the thing I remember most about that kid is that he always wants to give everyone a hug. And the thing I remember most about Kenny is that he punches that kid in the head almost every time he hugs anyone without them asking. When I was little, that kid hugged me, and while he was hugging me, Kenny punched him hard in the back of the head and told him not to touch me. I remember that feeling of him being in my arms, so happy to be hugging me one second, then crumpling into a screaming fit the next when his dad punched him. I wanted to tear Kenny apart, but I was too little. I still am. Angels, though, angels have amazingly intense physical strength. Even if they look small, they’re like ants. They can lift like one-hundred-and-fifty times their own weight.

My mom wasn’t in the living room. No one noticed me. They were stuck in some intense conversation. I slid in through the cracked door and was standing against the wall trembling, repeating, I was jumped. I was robbed, over and over in my head and staring at them. They’d taken the long mirror from the bedroom wall and laid it face up on the coffee table, taking up the whole table. There were powder and bills on it.

I was standing there, not hearing anything, looking over the scene and practicing my next move, when I heard Kenny saying my mom’s name. He said, “That bitch has her head too far up her ass to notice. You can’t let her push you around, Toni. She knows how to make this shit all right, but she can’t move it. I can move it. Keep the women in the kitchen where they belong, that’s what I say.” He reached out for a rolled up bill and snorted a line. He was turned sideways with his back to me. Kenny is really pale, white and skinny and tall. He had a scruffy stubble beard that day, with stringy, greasy dark hair hanging down to his shoulders. He 260

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was wearing an old T-shirt and jeans that hung off him, cause he’s skinny like a skeleton. He wiped his nose and handed the bill to his fat girlfriend. “We can tell her she’s in at seventy percent or something to calm her down, but she don’t know what it sells for.

How she’s gonna know the difference between seventy and fifteen?

I know Tracy. She never been good at math.” His fat girlfriend handed the bill to Toni. He leaned down to snort.

When he came back up from snorting, he was looking right at me, but it took a moment for him to realize that he was seeing me.

I wish he hadn’t. He blinked a couple of times then said, slowly, “Hey Gabriel, when did you come in?”

Everyone turned and looked at me. I could feel all their eyes on me, burning holes in me. The one who was burning holes in me most was Kenny. His red eyes were slanting at me and he looked real upset. “Hey there boy, how long you been standing there?” he asked, but like it was a real heavy question. He sucked on his tongue, contemplating something. Everything was moving slow, and I didn’t know what to say, so I just shook my head no.

Kenny shot out of his chair like a rocket and came at me. He grabbed me quick by the neck, under my chin, his thumb and finger holding on to either side of my jaw turning my head up to his face, which was bearing down on me. “How long you been standing there?” he hollered. “What’d you hear? You spyin? What’d you hear?” He was shaking me by under the jaw and hollering, and after a couple of seconds, even though I don’t think he meant to be, he was choking me. “What’d you hear? It aint good to be spying!” he kept saying. Everyone had stood up. Toni grabbed ahold of Kenny’s arm. His girlfriend and Toni’s sister, Anna, were hollering at him to let me go. Toni pushed on his arm and told him to calm down, so he let go, and Toni stood between us pushing me back. It was kind of chaos then. I was leaning down gasping for air, holding my knees and Kenny was still trying to come at me.

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talk to me. The girls were screaming for him to leave me alone, that I didn’t hear nothing. The guy in the cap hadn’t moved at all. He was just sitting in the chair watching us like we were a movie he was confused about.

Toni took Kenny by the shoulders and told him to calm down.

Kenny put his hands in the air and said, “Okay, sorry. I’m calm. I just want to talk to him. Just let me talk to him. Okay?” Toni nodded and stepped back.

“You going to let him back at that boy?” Anna, Toni’s sister asked.

“He’s just gonna talk talk to him,” Toni said, escorting him back over to me.

“Listen, I’m his uncle. I got rights!” Kenny hollered loud at her.

She folded her arms, shook her head no and looked grossed out at him. I don’t know how Kenny suddenly thought he was my uncle.

Kenny came up to me and knelt down, squatting, which actually made him shorter than me, even though I think he was trying to get on my level. I stood up, pressing my back against the wall.

Toni stood next to Kenny with his hand on his shoulder, looking worried. I hadn’t realized how much before, but Toni was becoming more and more of a pushover.

Kenny’s red eyes were looking right up into mine, his hands folded across his knees where he was squatting down. He fished around his front teeth with his tongue and squinted. “What’s that silver shit on your head, kid?” I didn’t answer. I just looked up at Toni, then Kenny looked at Toni too. Toni shrugged. Kenny looked back at me. He noticed my wings, kind of tilting his head like a dog that sees something it doesn’t understand, then he decided to ignore it and told me, “Let’s get serious. I need to know, did you hear anything I was saying? Anything maybe, about your momma?” I shook my head again. “What’s a matter. You gone mute now? Answer me.”

“No . . . no.” I said, kind of cracking. “I didn’t hear anything.”

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stare. Then he started punching his fist into the palm of his hands.

“You better not be lying. But even if you are, if you breathe a word of what you heard, or think you heard . . . You see these hands here?” He held open his hands. I looked at them. I saw them. They were wide with long skeleton fingers and dirty. “If you say anything, there’s gonna be blood on these hands here.” I nodded. He kept on. “There’s gonna be blood. And it’s not gonna be mine. You dig? But it might be your mother’s, and it will definitely be yours.”

“All right, what the fuck kind of a party is this?” Anna shouted.

She slammed her beer bottle down on the mirror/table. “Toni, you told me this was gonna be a party. I’m still waiting to have fun.”

“I’m just making sure the kid understands,” Kenny told her.

“You understand, don’t you, boy?” he asked. I nodded. Kenny stood up and took me by the arm. “Come on then, kid. Join the party.” He led me over to the couch and sat me down next to him on the couch.

“He didn’t hear shit. You’re all just being paranoid,” Anna said angrily. “I need another beer.”

Kenny’s fat girlfriend sat on one of the chairs and Toni sat down on the couch on the other side of Kenny. “You want me to get you another beer?” the guy in the cap asked.

“Tracy should be back with some soon,” Toni told her.

Kenny lit a cigarette and looked at the guy in the cap, “She’s a lot to handle.” He nodded to Anna. “She’s got a temper on her.

Some mouth.”

“You wanna say something about me, you can say it to me,” Anna told Kenny.

Kenny laughed and leaned back, sucking on his cigarette, “Huh uh, nope.” He shook his head, “I aint going to say nothing to you. I would hate to be the man that had to say something to you.”

I sat forward and asked Toni, “Can I go to my room?”

Kenny put his arm around me and pulled me back. “You just stay here right now. Spend some quality time with your cousin.”

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“I thought you was his uncle,” Anna said, rolling her eyes.

“Damn woman, you’re getting on my last nerve.” Kenny looked her up and down when he said that, but he wasn’t really looking at her like he hated her completely. Anna is very pretty. She’s young and in shape and wears clothes that fit her very nicely, not like his girlfriend. That day what she was wearing was a tank and tight shorts.

She’s very dark and very certain looking, confident, like a model.

No one said anything for a few minutes. Anna downed the last of her beer. Kenny smoked his cigarette while his fat girlfriend did another line. Toni sat fidgeting with his fingers, looking apologetic at his sister. That guy in the baseball cap sat still as a rock, facing forward. Sometimes he pinched his nose and snorted loudly then went back to sitting still. There’s always one guy like that at my mom’s parties. They’re like crocodiles. If you don’t step on them, you might never even notice they’re there.

Kenny still had his arm around me. He was moving it around weird, then it’s like he remembered suddenly. He sat forward and looked me over. “What the fuck is on your back?”

He grabbed me and turned me around. “What the fuck is that under your backpack?”

“Gabriel’s an angel,” Toni said, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

“He’s my little angel boy.” My mom pushed her way through the door, two cases of beer in her arms. Toni stood to help her with it.

“Hey Tracy.” Kenny gave me a meaningful look and shook his head no. I don’t know why he was so worried I was gonna tell on him. I had my own problems.

Toni went to the kitchen to open the beers. My mom said hi to everyone, then took my face and kissed my cheeks. “Hey baby, you got the medicine for me?”

I felt her soft hands on my cheeks. My skin was still wet from her little kisses. She was smiling at me, her face right in front of mine.

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little lips she paints with sparkling gloss. The bottom of her hair is black, but she dyes it light blond and pulls it up in a ponytail on the top center of her head. She’s round and soft and short, and like I said, she’s starting to look bad. I stared at her staring at me, her soft round face smiling and asking me if I got her medicine, and I just wanted to lunge forward and hug her and make her hold me.

But when she asked that, everything in me recoiled. My face dropped even further than it was. My mouth went dry. I swallowed hard and the words came out not convincingly at all, but too fast in a broken whisper, “I was jumped; I was robbed.”

She let go of me and put her hands on her hips. “What’re you talking about? Where’s the medicine, Gabriel?”

Toni came back in and passed out the beer. Kenny was staring hard at me. I swallowed again and made my voice work right. “I don’t have it. I was jumped.”

“Who jumped you?” my mom asked. I hadn’t planned the lie through this far. I thought for a second that maybe I should just tell them the truth about Aladdin taking it. But I knew he would get it harder than me, and I couldn’t do that.

“Some guy. He was big.”

My mom tilted her head. She was starting to look angry and suspicious.

“What was he supposed to get?” Kenny asked.

“The Sudafed,” Toni told him.

“Someone took your money?” Kenny asked. He was sitting next to me, leaning in, also looking suspicious.

“No. Someone took the Sudafed.”

“Why would someone steal the Sudafed?” my mom asked like it was completely ridiculous.

“I don’t know,” I told her, “probably to do the same thing you do with it.” I folded my arms and sat back, feeling defiant suddenly.

“He pushed me down and everything and you don’t even care!” I shouted, angrily. I really did feel angry that this had actually happened, and she didn’t care.

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“Who’s doing what I do with it?” my mom hollered. “What do you know what I do?”

Kenny wagged his finger in my face. “You’re lying. This boy’s a little liar.”

“Am not!” I shouted.

“Then why didn’t you say anything about it when you first came in?” Kenny said. “Tracy, he’s got a lying problem. Can’t trust anything he says. When kids start to get this way, you gotta teach them how to act or they’ll just keep doing it.”

My mom folded her arms and leaned her face down, her nose up against mine. “Gabriel, tell me the truth now. What did you do with the money I gave you?”

“I told you,” I squealed, “I bought the medicine, then these guys jumped me and took it.”

“These guys?” Kenny shouted. “Oh! Oh, he’s lying. I thought you said it was one guy.”

“Gabriel, I can’t take your shit right now, okay. Just tell me where the medicine is.” I stared blankly back at her. “Ah hell, I can’t take this no more,” my mom hollered to the ceiling. She let out a long sigh then sat on the edge of the chair, leaned down, grabbed a bill ,and did one of the last lines off the mirror/table. She leaned back and held her nose, then snorted and said again, shaking her head, “Nope, I can’t take no more of your shit.”

Kenny stood up, grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and pulled me to my feet. “He’s probably got the money on him right now.”

“I don’t!” He shook me by the collar.

“Give me your backpack.” I took it off and gave it to him. He opened it and dumped it out on the floor. My pencils and books fell in a dusty heap. Kenny inspected the backpack. “Nothing. Make him empty his pockets.”

“What’s in your pockets, Gabriel?”

I searched around in my pockets and felt at the edge of the angel card. “There’s nothing in there.”

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“Turn em inside out,” Kenny told me.

“They’re empty!” I shouted. Kenny grabbed me by the collar again and reached into my right pants pocket, then my left one. He grabbed the card out.

“Not empty. Ah ha! See Tracy, lying again.” He held the card up and shook it like a Polaroid. “What have we here?” He held the card out and read it. “Be your own angel. Where’d you get this?”

“I found it. So what?”

Kenny inspected the card. “Not true again. Right here it says CVS, $2.99.”

“What’s your point? I found it.”

My mom pushed Kenny aside and stepped up. “Gabriel, that was a lot of money I gave you. You know I need that money.

What’d you do with it? Did you buy a bunch of angel cards with it? Oh God, Gabriel. What in the hell is with you lately?”

“Why’s he buying angel cards?” Kenny asked.

“He’s got them all over his wall,” my mom told him, like she hated the thought of it.

Kenny’s eyes lit up. He looked like a cartoon villain. “Does he?”

He took hold of my arm and started leading me away. “Let’s go see.” My mom followed behind him. While he was pulling me, I looked pleadingly at the other people in the room.

Toni was still sitting on the arm of the couch, watching us with a blank look on his face. Anna was standing there drinking a beer. She smacked Toni in the arm. “What the fuck are they doing now?” Kenny led me around the corner into my room. I could hear Anna yelling from the living room. She was really going off. “What the fuck are those crazy people doing to that poor boy?

Damn Toni, this is about the worst party I ever been to. That bitch has got you into some fucked up shit. I came here to have a good time, not watch junkies beat up on kids. I hope the next time you call me, you got something better going on.” I could make out Toni mumbling something. Then I heard Anna say, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

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I started praying, “Don’t leave, don’t leave,” but I heard the door slam out there right before Kenny closed my bedroom door tight. He stood in front of my angel wall gaping, “What is this shit?

Tracy, I think your boy has done lost his mind. Why do you let him get away with this?”

“You think so?” She looked down at me, wavering, her eyebrows curling up in a question. Her body was still the same body that used to be my mom. Her face was still the same face that used to be my mom. But my mom, well a lot of the time, she just wasn’t there in her body, in her face. She was wavering, chewing on her lip, and she looked completely certain and completely confused at the same time. “You think he’s going crazy?” she said again, looking at me.

Kenny leaned down to me. “Where’s the money kid? You hiding it in your socks or something? I know the tricks. Take off your shoes.” I looked at my mom. She nodded. I was tearing up. I couldn’t help it. I took off my shoes and socks and tossed them on the floor in front of them. Kenny was visibly shaking. He grabbed me by the shoulders. “What’d you do with it? Hold out your arms.”

I held them out. He patted me down, doing a cop search on me.

“Take off those goddamned wings.”

“No!” I shouted, pulling away from him. I sat down, back against the wall with my arms folded.

“He’s hiding the money in the wings,” Kenny said, very excitedly, wiping his nose on his arm.

“Goddamnit, Gabriel,” my mom hollered. Kenny came at me fast. I smacked at him with my hands, but he got ahold of me enough to pull me away from the wall and get my wings off. I was just lying on the floor then crying while he was inspected the wings really roughly, until, after a few seconds, he was just tearing them up.

“There’s nothing in here,” he shouted, tossing my wrecked wings on the floor by my head. I saw them there all crushed and torn to bits and something too big in me started squealing loud as it could. I screamed at the top of my lungs.

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“Shut up! Shut up!” Kenny shouted, spitting when he yelled, his face turning red. My mom started yelling too. “Be quiet! Be quiet.” She stuck her finger in her ears. I was screaming as loud as I could. It sounded like a broken violin coming out of me.

I don’t know what happened, but the more they yelled, the louder I yelled, just screaming squealing sounds as loud as I could, writhing on the floor. I guess I was having a fit and so were they.

My mom had her hands over her ears and she was screaming, “Be quiet, be quiet!” while I was screaming, “Ahhhhhhh.”

Kenny finally picked me up from my fit and shook and shook me till my teeth rattled then smacked me once, hard across the cheek with the knuckle side of his hand. “That’s how you shut em up,” he said, nodding at me while I stood there whimpering. My mom took her hands from her ears and started chewing on her fingers looking scared and guilty.

“Oh no, oh no. I don’t lay hands on my kid. I don’t lay hands on my boy,” she started repeating, shaking her head, looking like she finally felt bad about something and also like she was going crazy.

“Calm down, Tracy. I didn’t hurt him. Sometimes they need a firm, fatherly hand is all. We’re teaching him a lesson. Okay?”

She was crying now, whimpering and sucking on her finger. She nodded yes uncertainly. Kenny looked deep into my eyes. “You take something that’s important to someone else, they gonna take something that’s important to you.” He stood and turned to my angel wall. “Now that’s an important lesson to learn in life.” He reached out his big long skinny, trembling skeleton fingers and started tearing off all the angels. He tore down the water-stained watercolored angels, the angels with trumpets and the Christmas angels, the Cherub angels, the Angel of the Hearth, and even the angel helping the kids over the rickety old bridge. What took two years to put up only took about two minutes to tear down. They were scattered in pieces all over my bed. My mom was crying quietly, tears coming all over her face. Kenny patted her arm. “Tough love’s hard, Tracy. Wouldn’t call it tough if it weren’t. It’s good for Track One: Send Me an Angel

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him though. He’s too old for this.” My mom nodded and wiped her face. He pushed her toward the door. “Let’s get on back, let him cool down.” He pushed her out the door and turned to me, “Now you just stay in here for a while and think about what you done,” he told me, then closed the door behind himself. it ’ s a hard life for an angel. Historically, we’ve been treated

pretty badly; Sodom and Gomorrah, the angels dying in the battle between heaven and hell for God, when they thought they were supposed to be immortal. That must have been a heavy blow. Even Mary accused her angel of being a liar when he told her she was going to have Jesus. That angel’s name was Gabriel too. It was probably a lot harder to have the Virgin Mary calling you a liar than to hear it from Kenny and my mom.

But still, that night was the worst night of my life. I lied there staring at the fake wood wallpaper with the bits of glue and things still stuck to it where my heaven used to be. I don’t know how long I stayed in there, but after however long it was, suddenly my body just started moving without me. I bent down, got in my drawer, took out the money I had been saving up from change to get my silver angel back from the pawnshop, and shoved it in my pocket.

I put my shoes and socks back on and checked myself out in the mirror. I had on a very old retro made Mighty Mouse T-shirt that was too small for me and a pair of jeans that were too big held tight around my waist with a brown leather belt. I never noticed my clothes when I was wearing my wings. Now I just looked like a normal person, except for the weird silver band that didn’t look like a halo at all without the wings, so I took it off. I just looked like any other kid in a cartoon T-shirt and jeans, pale with smasheddown curly hair and too small for my age. I messed up my hair, got my denim jacket on, slipped open the window, and climbed out onto the fire escape. I wasn’t thinking or planning anything. I was just moving. I’d seen Aladdin do it a thousand times. I’d never done it myself. The jump from the bottom of the fire escape was 270

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bigger than I expected and I twisted my ankle, so I hop-ran seven blocks all the way to the subway station, then I waited till I heard the train, jumped the turnstile in a weird kind of limping move and got on.

Then the train was moving. Both of us were moving forward, unthinkingly, me and the train. I knew in my bones what was coming, that sparking city with its bright lights and sparkling people, and I knew I was going to keep going this time. I was going past Delancey station this time and getting out for good, getting out in that place that’s the real city. That place that looks so much like the stars those country people must be staring at at night, calling it heaven. I was going, going, going to that place that lives like dreams, like stars that never burn out. And you know who lives there, up there in the stars?

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track two

The Chain

“ you will begin to follow an unholy path. Down this path you will lay your heart in pieces, planted like seeds in the earth. But in this path you will take, the soil will be poisoned. Nothing will grow here, except what is wicked. Sparse thorny vines lining a dark way.

Your heart will become a series of dried pebbles, hard stones in the cursed dirt of this deserted path you have chosen. There is nothing more I can do for you. May God forgive you.”

Four cards. She remembered her grandmother’s expression as she laid those cards like heavy stones on the table in front of her, the woman’s face also growing chiseled and stiff as she divined their meaning. A spade. Five of hearts. A king. Ace of diamonds.

Laid beside a breadknife on the kitchen table. She’d asked, “What does America hold for me?” Her last day in Russia, twenty years old, a beaming, barely recognizable reflection of her current self, she’d expected a very different answer. But with those playing cards, her grandmother had looked through to the center of her and seen the thing she was not, at that time, able to put into words. helen stood on the porch watching the sun rise, listening to

the wind blow over the miles of field that surrounded the house.

She wondered that the sunrise could be monochromatic. Gray. It was gray. She’d never seen such a gray sunrise. The light played with the thick clouds tinting them three slightly variant shades of gray. But still, it was all gray, as was the house, as was her hair, as 272

was, she thought, the horse. But she was wrong. The horse was very much white. Still, an awful image of the gray sky, gray house, gray horse and herself, a gray-haired woman, formed a hoary image in her mind, in which, if she inspected it closely, she was sure she would find written in the shadows, or perhaps if she chipped away the paint, her grandmother’s prophecy etched.

The screen door of the porch clanged behind her. The girl stepped out and passed her quickly without so much as a hello, hopping down the stairs, making her way into the field where the white horse stood chewing. Damn the light, Helen thought. Damn the gray light that outlines the black and pale silhouette of my love growing distant. Helen leaned an arm on the banister and shook her head at the sight of Mya combing Aryan’s mane. She loves that damned horse more than anything else, Helen thought, as Mya pulled the horse down the hill, out of sight.

Randy poked her head out the door, interrupting her thought.

“Hey Ruski. I made us some breakfast. Come on in. I’m itching to get something in my mouth worse than a homecoming queen on prom night. That girl’s peckish. You gonna come eat some at least?”

Helen spit over the banister then followed Randy inside.

She took a chair at the round linoleum-top table, where she found a breakfast plate prepared for her.

“Thanks for the eggs.”

“Well most of em gonna go to waste. That girl don’t eat much.”

Randy banged the pan on the stove and shook her head. Her rattail swayed at her neckline, a black streak of hair trailing down from her gray mullet.

“No, not in mornings. But she has good appetite otherwise.

Why you always make her breakfast she never eats, then you get upset?” Helen asked through her chewing.

“You saying it’s my fault? That girl’s weird the way she acts.

All she cares about are her horse and these goddamned puzzles.”

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and tossed it toward the living room. “Never eats nothing. Finishes puzzles in an hour that takes most folks months to do, if ever. I aint said nothing before, but I think she’s maybe got some spooky stuff around her.”

Helen held her fork in the air. “You said that before. You said that a lot. What do you mean you never say that?”

“I’m just saying,” Randy mumbled, looking out the kitchen window as she washed her plate and coffee mug. “She’s not leaving again, is she? Where do you think she’s always disappearing to?”

Helen ignored Randy’s comment. Mya had developed a habit of taking Aryan out for a ride and not returning for days. Helen did not know where it was Mya went, and every time she had inquired while making no attempt to mask her anger on the subject, Mya had kept quiet or simply answered, “Around.”

“You’re not making bacon?” Helen asked. “Sit down. I make us some bacon.” Helen went to the fridge and fished around for the bacon.

“I’ll make the bacon. You don’t know how to make the bacon,” Randy hollered, clanging the dish in the drying rack.

Helen carried the bacon to the stove. Randy reached for it.

Helen held it away. “Leave me alone. You sit down. I know how to making bacon.”

“Fine.” Randy made her way to the table. “But you better cook the bacon good this time. I don’t want to be chewing all day long.”

As she sat, she expelled a loud squeal and hopped back up. “Goddamned puzzles! I told ya.” Randy shook the puzzle she’d found in her seat, two horseshoes connected by a metal ring. It clanged as she shook it. She sat back down and began fidgeting with the horseshoe puzzle. “I know guys who had this for years still can’t get it,” she said, chatting while Helen laid the bacon frying in the pan.

Randy twisted the horseshoes around, tugging hard and grimacing. “I still aint figured this thing out. That girl come in here and flip, flip, flip, it’s done in two minutes. I don’t know why she likes it so much, it’s nothing to her.”

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“She’s liking it because it annoys you. You are the one who bought her those things anyway. Why you did that if they bother you so much?”

Randy gave one last groaning tug on the horseshoes and ring then flung the thing, defeated, to the tabletop. “I got em so she’d like me. To say thanks for letting me stay.”

“What are you caring if she likes you if you think she’s a Brumhilda?”

“That bacon done yet?”

“No. You said cook it good. That’s what I’m doing, cooking it good!” when helen originally pictured it, it had been herself and Mya alone in that house till the end of their days. Nothing ever went the way she wanted, though. Mya had disappeared for nearly a month after Jules’s arrest. When she showed up to live with her, Helen thought she’d finally got what she wanted. But after only three months with her, Mya left again for a full two months, taking Aryan on the road with a punk performance art circus. During those two months, Helen worried endlessly that Mya would not return. She paced through the rooms of the large empty house anticipating her own next stint on the road, beginning to feel the lonesomeness that she guessed Mya must have felt waiting for her to return from her weeks of trucking.

The house was large with three bedrooms on the second floor, two bathrooms with a proper kitchen as well as dining and living room. “It’s big enough to get lost in,” she’d told Mya upon first showing it to her. And during the two months Mya was away, Helen found herself very lost. Houses have a way of becoming their inhabitants, becoming the body of the collective spirits of the people who fill them. But the house was too large for Helen to fill on her own. She became a skeleton in the loose skin of it, wandering through thoughts of what it was of herself that was not there when she was there. Her lack became ghosts creeping in the

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unlighted corners of the home where she found what she was not, existing in the shadows.

She was not a woman who had built a family, or anything that she could rely on to be present. She was not willing to take no for an answer. She was not a woman who had chosen her love well.

She was not being loved as well as she was loving. She was not speaking her own language. She was not in her own country. She was not home at home.

It was at a point deep in her anguish that Randy contacted her. Randy had been her lover many years before. She called saying that she had just had her breasts removed from cancer and needed a place to stay while she recovered. Helen gladly took her in. Briefly after that, Mya returned from her trip, grown from her experiences on the road and more independent.

That was nearly six months before, and Randy now showed no sign of leaving. Although it seemed, from the way she looked at Randy, that Mya woke every day expecting to hear the woman bidding them farewell, Helen had somehow over those months settled into the idea of Randy staying on.

It’s easy to fall into bed with an old lover. They did not acknowledge that it was happening, quite regularly in fact, even to one another, let alone to Mya. It would have seemed strange to them to acknowledge it in any way. The act of love with a love that has passed often seems nothing more than a fond reminiscence of some time that was dear which is no more; nothing more perhaps than an empty recollection of a familiar song that was once shared.

And there is no use explaining to anyone else why you might find yourselves humming the same tune momentarily. To Helen it seemed as simple as casting a glance at her own shadow. There was no betrayal in the act, no obligation to any other, no need to acknowledge her own shadow stretching behind her. It was there.

It had been there and there it remained, present, un-present, a moment that has passed and yet somehow lingered, unlighted and visible only for its lack.

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Yet the things that women do not acknowledge between themselves, as if those things will not exist without admittance, like seeds swept to the back of the heart, there in the dark places begin to grow the strangest nocturnal perennials, often the sort that feed on curious little creatures brought in by the deception of their camouflage. And the camouflage of the flower that began to grow in the dark gardens of the hearts of the women in the gray house was that of invisibility, its petals made of the coldest shar-edged glass, which cast only the slightest outline in shade.

Helen was guilty. It was a brittle path she was laying. But it seemed fertile enough. There were so many doors. When one was closed, she simply opened another, always to find a woman or a girl waiting. When the girl said no, she found the woman. But when the girl allowed her, she forgot the woman completely. She never wondered what it was to be the forgotten woman. She did not wonder that the girl might be watching even after turning her away, watching to see where she had to go without her. the sky is a mirror reflecting the illusion of human ability to perceive the external. Mya tilted her head toward the blanket of white and gray that hung above her, the mercifully masked face of heaven cloaking for us throughout our days the dark depth of our inconsequence, as she rode the horse out through the field and along the edge of woods extending far beyond where Helen’s land ended. No one seemed to own the land beyond the land that Helen owned. This land was nobody’s land. No one worked it.

There were no neighbors near enough to claim it. Nobody wants to be where nobody is, Mya thought, except Helen. “Helen want me and her to be where nobody is, together.” She turned Aryan through a clearing of trees and slowed near a small pond.

“Sometime soon maybe we just keep going,” she told the horse, leaning forward and petting its mane as it came to a standstill at the edge of the water. Mya bit her bottom lip and scanned the horizon.

“Gonna be too damned cold for a while though.” It felt to her that

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since she had arrived, she had been, albeit somewhat reluctantly, planning her escape. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Helen. She did, just not very much.

Now that Randy had entered the house, Mya was retreating even further from the possibility of allowing this to become her permanent home. Like the murky and vulgar pond water, she was full of contradictory emotions. And also like the pond, the place where that cesspool of her emotions on the subject festered had gone dull, cold, gray. As the months had crept on, the increasing ambiguity of her emotions gave her a general feeling of separation from her day to day existence. She watched, as if from a great distance seen through binoculars, the women playing out their grotesque one act, illustrating the country life of two old butch housewives squabbling over the dried white hairs of the most asinine and infinitesimal aspects of diurnal existence, and seeming to find a significance within them which escaped Mya’s idea of human dignity.

Randy was crude and dumb in a way that made her flesh grow scales. In her mind, Helen was miles above Randy, and yet she suspected they may have become lovers again. Although the suspicion was well founded and growing large, she would not allow herself to look at it head-on, knowing that if it was true, she would never be able to touch Helen again. This was not as much due to jealousy as to the repulsion of the thought of Randy having shared something intimate with her, as well as the infuriating idea that Randy might have any good reason to think of herself as equal to her.

Aryan stomped her hooves, anxious to get running. Mya shook the reins and Aryan took off around the pond and up the opposite hill. When they were running, she felt at one with the horse. Her mind slowed, counteracting the cold wind speeding past her ears.

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riding over the plains. In some way, that horrible Hank had allowed her mother’s hopes to live on in her. She guessed that even awful people must have something good to bring to this world. Riding Aryan, she was simultaneously free and attached to a heritage. But within her feeling of freedom was an agonizing guilt as her mind went to thinking about Jules.

She had decided nearly as soon as Jules was sentenced that she would lock her heart against her, and had to try and think of her as little as possible. It would drive her crazy if not. On the back of the speeding horse, she was safe to hold her torment without really touching it. It blew through the center of her in a steady stream that was gone almost as quickly as it had come, and pounded under hoof into the ground behind her; Jules’s desperate eyes flickering through dark bars, Jules’s bound hands and defeated hunch against a cold wall repressing the urge for movement. The image of lamented years of her lover’s life becoming condensation on the cold gray bricks of her cell, Mya let blow through her like a thunderclap and buried under each powerful stamp of her beast’s hooves, and that was the only time she thought about her. the sun had long set by the time she returned to the house.

Helen’s truck sat in the drive. The downstairs was empty and still.

The lights were all off except for one dim orange light glowing in the living room and, Mya had noted before entering, what appeared to be a candlelight flickering upstairs in the window of Randy’s bedroom. Mya went into the kitchen and made herself a sandwich, then retreated to the living room, curling in the burly chair next to the lamp where she chewed the sandwich slowly, staring out the window at the silhouettes of trees agitated by the November wind. The house was large and made of sturdy wood.

Not a sound crept through the walls or under the doors. It was too early, she thought, for them to have gone to bed, but something in her refused to go looking for them. She was big enough to fill the empty spaces. The anguish, suspicion, and lonesomeness she

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chased out of her mind filled the large rooms of the house like hornets’ nests humming in the darkness.

She finished her sandwich, stood and turned on a second lamp.

Six puzzles, all of which Randy had purchased for her, lie scattered about the living room. She collected them and laid them out on the wooden floor. There was a Rubik’s Cube, the horseshoes and rings, a wooden puzzle made of six pieces that fit together forming a star-shaped ball, a double disk with twelve multicolored beads lined up in four slots, a metal puzzle made of five spiraling shapes and hooks, and the most recent, and as of yet, most challenging gift, the three-part, three-sectioned chain.

At either end of the three-sectioned chains, three links with a ring formed an impossible conundrum as there was no break at any point in any of the chains’ links. Mya had been trying to solve the puzzle for four days, the longest time she had ever spent solving one. She had been thinking of it as a difficult enigma. But she was beginning to wonder if perhaps this might not indeed be a true mystery. The difference between a mystery and an enigma is an enigma is solvable, a mystery is not solvable, at least barring the intervention of divine revelation. She had memorized each notch of each link and gone over it in her mind a thousand times. When Randy presented it to her days before, she’d spent some thirty minutes inspecting the thing, then handed it back, proclaiming it impossible. “This aint no puzzle,” she told her. “This just three chains welded together at both ends.”

Randy responded with a proud smirk. “Finally found one she caint figure, huh? Just cause she caint get this un, she’s sayin it’s not even a real puzzle.” Randy got in her face and placed the chains once more in her hands. “This is a real puzzle, girl. But it’s trickier then a wet willy. It looks like the simplest thing, but this here’s one of the hardest puzzles in the world. I asked around, took me a while to get it, but an ole boy I know used to be a carny sent it over, said it took him a year to get this one, and boy did he make money on it selling tries. He said there was only one guy ever got it in the 280

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years he worked the booth. If you get it, I guess I’ll have to get you one of those big stuffed bears as a prize.”

Randy started getting puzzles for Mya months before, after watching her finish a Rubik’s Cube in twenty minutes. Each new puzzle was harder than the last, and although Helen viewed Randy’s gifts as a sign of fraternity and affection between them, Mya knew Randy needed desperately to prove that Mya was not the genius Helen believed her to be. It was not, Mya knew, the doing of the puzzles that bothered Randy, but Helen’s reactions. How she had doted on her, hollering about what a genius she was, and saying she should go on talk shows and get famous from her talent.

Helen went on about it for days, messing up the cube, handing it back to Mya and watching her put it right again, also making Randy watch as if it were the greatest performance of all time, oohing and aahing with every click of the squares.

“Damn, that aint no genius thing,” Randy said, the fifth time she put it right. “It’s as easy for her as pickin her nose. That’s just a trick she learned someone taught her, didn’t they?” Mya shook her head no. “Mhmm, I’ll bet it aint. There’s just a trick to it, once you know it, it’s easy as three-day-old underwear. That’s all.” Two days later, Randy came in with the horseshoe and rings and tossed it in Mya’s lap. “Here you go, genius girl. Riddle me this un. Now you gonna get the piss taken outta ya.”

In an hour, Mya had it taken apart. “Oh yeah, but that’s the easy part,” Randy said. “They say the real trick is getting it back together.”

In twenty minutes Mya had it back together and Helen was bouncing around the room squealing, “My God, my God, she is genius, I told you!” kissing Mya on the cheeks and phoning friends to ask if they knew how to get ahold of television talk show hosts.

Mya held tight that she wasn’t going to go on TV no matter what Helen said.

Every couple weeks, Randy brought in a new puzzle. She seemed to have an endless pool of carnival workers to pull advice Track Two: The Chain

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from and was now a regular customer at the novelty store in the nearby town. She’d even begun ordering from their catalog after she’d bought all the tricks in the small store. In the house, there were nearly twenty puzzles lying about, all finished and put back together. In the country, there is time for doing puzzles. mya now sat with her most recent challenge, turning it over in

her hands. She had memorized every notch of every link. Unlike the others, this puzzle seemed to possess no improbability, only impossibility. There existed no illusion, no opening, no chimera of depth or size through which one may find the eye of space winking toward a trick slip, a manipulation allowing the smaller object to suddenly slide around the larger thing, just an endless line of impenetrable closure.

“Still at it, huh?” Mya was snapped out of her thought by Randy, who stood in the entrance to the living room. She hadn’t heard her come down the stairs. “We thought you was gone on one of your ridings again,” Randy told her as she plopped down on the couch and began flipping the television remote.

The glow of the TV created a blue ball of light in Mya’s periphery. “Where’s Helen?” she asked, twisting the chain.

“Shhh,” Randy waved her off, “my show’s comin on.”

“I aint supposed to be talking while you watch people pounding each other in the head?” Mya asked, annoyed. “You need quiet for that?”

“Hey now,” Randy hollered, “American Gladiators is the best show on. I don’t know why they ever took it off before. They were smart revivin it. This is what everything comes down to and how come our country got where it is. When all’s said and done, we’re being the toughest, we’re the strongest of all. And those chicks are hot.

Yes siree, Bob. When they get going, their boobies bounce all over the place. And damned tough. Heck, I wouldn’t kick those bitches outta bed for eating crackers. Best show on television.”

“That crap gonna rot your brain,” Mya told her. “What little there is left,” she added, mumbling.

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“Mya deavutchka does not watch the television. That’s why she is little genius,” Helen cooed from the bottom of the stairs.

Mya sat the chain down and stood, “Where’ve you been?”

Helen came into the living room and took Mya lovingly by the waist, kissing her on the forehead. “I was taking naps.”

“A nap, at nine at night? Why didn’t you just wait for bed?” Mya placed her hands on Helen’s chest and held her away. “Was Randy up there takin a nap, too?”

“Where you go?” Helen asked, pushing her forehead to Mya’s.

“I thought you was going away for long again. You tell me from now on, why don’t you tell me how long you’re being gone? I tell you when I’m gone how long I am going for.”

Mya pressed back against Helen’s pushing, looking her meanly in the eyes. “That’s cause you know. You got a schedule. I aint got no schedule, and I got no way of knowing how long I’ll be gone till I gone and done it. I just follow my urges. You know how that is, don’tcha?”

Mya was growing up. She never used to challenge Helen so confidently, and had learned the art of saying things without quite saying them. Helen blamed this on the time she had spent on the road. She ignored her small lover’s question, patted her on the head then reached down to inspect a seemingly less portentous challenge. “Are we close to finishing?” Helen asked in a singsong voice, dangling the chain in the air.

Mya snatched it from her and sat back down, cross-legged on the floor. “Not yet,” she said, dejectedly.

Randy turned, leaning over the arm of the couch. “You know, girlie, while you out sometimes I been looking at that thing myself.

I think I’m getting an idea how it works.”

Mya whipped her head around, “What do you mean you gettin an idea? You aint finished any of the other ones and those are easy.

How do you think you’re getting an idea about this here?” Her voice rose to an irritated squeal that caused Randy to smirk. She peeled herself away from American Gladiators momentarily, swaggering over to where Mya sat.

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“I guess you two don’t understand how real genius works.”

Randy folded her arms and stood over Mya, a cocky eyebrow raised above her gloating smirk. “See, y’all don’t know this, but I’m a savount myself.” Mya grimaced and shook her head. Her neck craned back to view the tower of Randy above her, catching the woman at a leaning angle, her knees and folded arms seen below her viciously infinitesimal and confident visage.

Helen took a seat behind Mya in the cushy chair. “What you mean with, savount?” Helen asked.

Randy clicked her tongue loud. “I’ve been told I’m a savount.

You know, our brains work different than others. Sometimes the easy things is harder for us, but the most challenging things, we slip through like warm butter. I think it’s cause our brains are like bored with the easy stuff and don’t get turned on till it gets real interesting.”

“If yer a that, I’m the empress of China,” Mya cooed from the floor.

Randy took a step back and let her arms fall to the side. “You better watch how you talk to me, girlie. Don’t make me titty slap you.”

“That’s disgusting,” Mya growled.

“Disgusting? You saying I’m disgusting? Don’t make me take this tit out and smack you with it.”

During her battle with cancer, Randy received double mastectomy, and didn’t have enough money to get reconstructive surgery, but did have enough to buy the silicon implants, which she wore in her bra, padding her scarred, flat chest. As a way of coping with her intimate loss, or perhaps it was just a convenient drunken discovery, she had turned the symbol of her vulnerability literally into a mechanism of defense. Randy had taken to producing her left breast, in moments of anger, suddenly from her bosom and smacking people across the face with it. Generally she did this to men at bars when she was drunk, which Mya had witnessed on three occasions. The action was so stealthily executed it left people dazed and confounded more than anything, wondering if they had hallucinated the incident, the woman suddenly reaching down her shirt, 284

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producing a translucent silicon tit, which before they had time to fully identify it as such, was whacking them in the face, stretching and squishing, producing a sharp smacking sound when it connected. Yes, Randy gave credence to the representation of female corporeality as a fearful and petrifying apparition composed of unattached objects of lack, representing the simultaneous contradictory existence of voids, as she quickly returned the plasmatic sphere to its rightful place, shielding her heart, before her victims even had time to rub their cheeks and blink the totality of the event into cognition.

“You aint gonna smack me with nothing,” Mya said, standing and planting her feet aggressively. “Not no tit, for sure.”

“You’re just worried I’m gonna figure it out before you is all.”

Randy said, cocking her head. “You sure as shit worried, girlie,” she chuckled, making fun.

“You can’t figure yer ass from your elbow, how you gonna figure that puzzle out?” Mya shouted back.

Randy’s face reddened and her right hand began its descent into the leftmost side of her T-shirt. Helen jumped up from where she sat and stood between them, placing her hands out and pushing them away from each other. “Come on, come on the two of you. We are family time. Now be like civilized people.”

“A dog may be caught walkin on its hind legs now and again, but that don’t make it no civilized person,” Mya said, directing her words harshly at Randy.

“That don’t make it no genius either,” Randy hollered back.

Helen turned to Randy, glaring hard, “Pizda!” she shouted.

“You are adult. Act like one!”

Randy clicked her tongue loud. “Fine. I’m getting a beer, then I want to watch my show in peace. You hear me? In peace!”

“I’m going to bed,” Mya shouted as Randy made her way to the kitchen. “You think you can figure it out? Have at it.” She threw the chain puzzle at the couch then turned, avoiding Helen’s grasp, and stomped loudly up the stairs to her room.

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Randy guzzled down the top of the beer and let out a large burp as she sat herself back down in front of American Gladiators.

She leaned over, fingering the chains, as a large German woman pounded a muscled brunette in the head with a foam trident. She laid the chain puzzle beside her on the couch and patted it lovingly.

“Why you have to do that? You are so much older,” Helen said, perturbation showing in her face.

Randy did not turn her head to look. “I told ya I wanna watch my show in peace is all I wanna do now. I aint the one starting trouble. Just let me alone.”

“Eh,” Helen waved her off and turned to make her way up the stairs.

“That girl’s nothing but spoiled,” Randy hollered at her.

Helen spun round. “She is not spoiled. She has not had nothing in this life. She is nothing like spoiled.”

“You been spoiling her and she aint even grateful,” Randy said, sucking at her beer bottle, her eyes transfixed by the white-hot glow of the television. “You’ll see how much she thanks you. She aint loving you no more the way you been loving her. Yer better cutting your losses. You’ll see. Yer gonna get used.” The words cut Helen through to the core.

“Eh!” Helen grunted and headed upstairs. country houses have a way of maintaining dust that gives one the perpetual feeling, even if one has lived there for many years, that one is inhabiting an abandoned space. Country houses do not belong to their inhabitants, but to the ever shifting minutia of the world. Mya lay in her bed watching the dust waft slowly about her candles’ small flames. The wooden floor upon which her bed rested creaked only slightly, but at that creaking she knew without a doubt Helen had come to stand outside her door. She turned over onto her stomach and began picking at the threads of her blanket, feeling herself to be a caged thing awaiting her keeper, but also full of lonesomeness in need of affection.

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Helen tried not to let herself sigh largely, tried to keep her heart from pounding fast, but with every slight and tempered breath she took, she felt she might die of suffocation. She shifted from foot to foot outside the door, sniffing out just the right moment in time to turn the handle. Would she be accepted tonight? Each time Mya turned her away, and the incidences of rejection had been abundant, Helen felt another piece of what she knew herself to be, ripped away, and watched those torn things run in the shadows where the things she was not and would never be haunted her.

Each rejection made only more infectious the plague of the unspoken knowledge that if Mya had anywhere else to go that was fitting for Aryan, she would not be with her, and pushed her another step closer to the permanent bed of the woman she no longer loved but with whom the pantomime came easily.

There was no right moment in time to be found, so finally she turned the handle and stepped in. Mya stayed on her stomach, wincing slightly as Helen closed the door behind herself.

“Mya deavutchka.” Mya glanced over her shoulder, curling a curious brow at Helen. “I hope you are not still upset,” Helen said.

She slowly crossed the room and sat on the edge of Mya’s bed.

Mya rolled over onto her back and propped herself up on her elbows. “I’m getting real tired of her. She’s base and dumb. I don’t know how you ever could’ve been with her.” Her tone was venomous. Her eyes slanted accusingly. “I know it’s a big enough place for three, and I don’t guess I’d like being so alone with just us, but that woman is chewin on my last nerve.”

“Come, come. Be calm.” Helen took Mya by the hips and pulled her over, resting Mya’s head in her lap. She petted her hair.

“Just give her chance. She might surprise you. She has very special gifts too, you know? She is kind . . .”

“Special gifts?” Mya squealed, sitting up and setting her angry eyes on Helen. “If you think that woman got special gifts, then it’s no wonder you think I’m a goddamned genius. You’d think that about anybody if you think that about her!”

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Helen took Mya by the shoulder and pushed her hard back down into her lap. “Calm down!” She petted Mya’s head forcefully. “She is an old friend who needs a place to stay. You would want me to turn away a woman with cancer?” Helen shook her head at Mya whose face was the pinched perfection of annoyance.

“No. You would not want me to do that,” Helen continued. “You are not a monster.” Mya rolled her eyes and moaned loudly. “She is good woman,” Helen said softly, her voice trailing off as she petted Mya’s hair.

Mya pushed her hand away, but Helen kept another hand on her chest, holding her down. “She is not a good woman,” Mya growled from where she found herself pinned in Helen’s lap.

“You’re a good woman. She’s not a good woman. She’s dumb and greedy and jealous and boastful. Coming here living off you and grown.” She shook her head. “Thinks she can finish that puzzle?

That’s the most impossible thing I’ve ever seen in all my life,” Mya snorted, folding her arms to her chest over Helen’s steady hand.

“Maybe she is some kind of savount, like she said. Maybe she’s finishing the puzzle and you will see. Who knows? Don’t you be jealous, too.” Helen clicked her tongue. Mya began to tremble with anger. She grabbed Helen’s hand and flung it off, wiggling her way from her lap and sitting up again, facing Helen on the bed.

“Jealous? I aint jealous. I’m degraded is what I am! I’m ashamed to be livin with that trash and to be lovin someone associatin with that trash. You are so much better than that, Helen, to be fooled by her. Yer a strong and tough and brave one. You done more for me than anyone ever done, and under that toughness, yer kind and giving! She can’t hold a coin to you, but somehow she’s just a pulling you in.” Mya smacked the mattress with her fist. She was still trembling with anger, but Helen’s face no longer held any notions of a fight.

“You feel all that for me?” she asked, her eyes watery and wide.

She placed her hand on Mya’s cheek. “You mean it?”

Mya’s shoulders relaxed. She shook her head dejectedly. “Yer 288

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better than her. She aint no savount, and can’t finish no puzzle,” Mya kept on.

“Forget about that nonsense.” Helen placed her other hand on Mya’s other cheek, holding her face in her tender grip and kissed her once lightly on the lips. “What’s important is you love me . . . and I love you.” Helen leaned in again, kissing Mya more forcefully and pushing her down onto her back. Mya fell without a fight. Helen bit at her ear and kissed her neck as the girl began to move beneath her. “Ya lublu tibya,” Helen repeated in a whisper.

Those words, to Mya, always sounded like “yellow blue, something strange,” and made her want to giggle. But they were pouring from Helen with such watery emotion she didn’t dare even smirk.

She could feel Helen’s body growing hot on top of her. Helen’s yearning affected an electricity in Mya. She pushed Helen up so she could look her in the eye. The woman’s face was a wash of desire and flushed. Mya bit softly at Helen’s large, pink bottom lip, and felt her thigh begin to quiver where it rested between her legs. She did not know if she truly possessed any amorous love for Helen anymore, but her lust had never fully waned. She loved Helen’s ability to take absolute control of her body and completely show her longing unbridled, unmasked. There was a bravery and forcefulness to her lovemaking that never ceased to turn Mya misty, even when she was saying no.

Mya lifted Helen’s shirt over her head and took her pale pink nipples in her mouth, sucking ferociously. Helen moaned and grabbed Mya by the hair. She rolled over on her back, pulling the girl on top of her and forced her head into her crotch, rubbing her face on the seam of her pants. With Helen, Mya always felt like she’d really been somewhere. Mya struggled against Helen’s grip, feeling the burn of the cloth on her chin. She sat up, undid the woman’s pants and pulled them off. Again, Helen gripped the back of her hair firmly in her fists and pushed Mya into her. Only when Mya had her fully in her mouth did her forcefulness subside and she let herself lie down, resting in the seizure of her petition.

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Mya continued. The moments of question or possible rejection were over, and Helen was able to live fully in what they were sharing. All other moments with Mya, for Helen, were simply moments that were not this moment. Every incident of lovemaking with Mya was one moment in time that Helen stepped into like one entering a favored room of a home. It was the same pocket of existence Helen was entering, a moment in existence when Mya was fully hers; a moment in existence that she knew full well that the one she loved most in the world desired her not only out of obligation or usury, but out of a shared pleasure.

Mya tasted her musk and wetness. The smell was strong and made her feel at home. Helen pulled her hair and moved her hips up, begging. Mya slipped her fingers inside Helen’s thick flesh. The feel of the girl’s small, soft hands in her, and knowing that complete control, sent Helen through the window, her eyes trembling at the sky, filled with pure joy. After several ruptures, Mya lifted her head, wiped her chin on her arm, and scooted herself up, face to face with Helen. The girl was still fully clothed and Helen completely nude.

Mya lay upon Helen like a wildcat sunning on a mountain rock, her slight hands trailing down the side, finding the small trickle that opened there to her. And when she pushed her little fingers inside again, Helen would have liked to have died there in that perfection.

The girl did not continue softly but went at it as an elegant jouster into the fray as Helen had taught her to do. She came to her final mortal instant awash in a flow of contradiction—the idea of one so small, so young wielding such a great power over her, which produced through its friction a new well of lust. The fact that Mya was such a small childlike thing, and did hold so much power over her, compounded her power over Helen exponentially.

Helen howled, grabbed Mya’s head and pressed it into her ample bosom, quivering as she went to face the judgment of pleasure’s pang. Tears welled in her eyes, but she did not let the girl see.

Instead, she flipped her over like a ragged doll and began hastily undressing her.

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Mya had many other lovers in her few months traveling with the vagabond circus and had developed a wide palette for the tastes of the female sex, as well as for the proclivities of a few roving disciples of intermittent genders. But Helen had been her first lover, and so had planted inside her the very definition of lovemaking. Thus far, she compared every act to what it was with Helen.

The woman did not flinch when she began to growl and paw, but took her up in her strength, pressing her against the wall, beating the base of her ferocity like a well-oiled drum.

Mya was a country girl. She acclimated quickly to the libidinous rhythms of nature, which manifested through Helen as a circadian flux that took her in its pulse every other day. Helen came to her. Mya no longer knew what it was to reach out to choose the act, but was only left with the option of acceptance or rejection.

Something in her had been worn smooth, had plateaued. Where there once existed a craggy passion, now only the level surface of sure-footed placidity remained. Even as the woman took her the way she liked best, in the manner that was for her the seminal definition of physical splendor, she could not chase away the feeling that she was simply a bystander, the casualty of a tide of desire.

Helen moved her hand inside of her, holding her with her thumb out like a French horn. She gripped her hard at the same time by the back of her neck, keeping her face to face as she repeated, “Ya lublu tibya.” Mya moved back against her, her legs wrapped around Helen’s waist, meeting Helen’s intense gaze with a look of question moving through her physical pleasure. She wondered, if Helen stopped coming for her, would she ever make the choice to go to Helen again. She did not think she would.

This thought set a sickness deep inside of her that pressed against the feeling of Helen rising and falling deep in her. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, finding her final moment there in the space between the pressure of deep sickness and deep arousal, her head turned away, her eyes closed to the woman pleading her love in a language she did not speak.

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randy finished the beer and went to the kitchen for another.

She opened and closed the refrigerator door, the little light flickering in the darkness. She laid the tip of the beer bottle diagonally on the counter and gave the bottle a whack, knocking the cap off. She was still sore from Helen’s hands. She had hoped that girl would be gone for days. But here she was, alone again. She couldn’t believe that Helen had followed her up the stairs right after what Helen had just done to her. Randy went back into the living room and plopped herself into the plush chair. The television glowed. The gladiators grunted with whacks. The house creaked above her, echoing the sound of lovemaking. That’s the last time I’m doing that shit, she told herself, knowing it wasn’t. “Keeping me around for when her kid says no,” she mumbled to herself, becoming more drunk. “Damn spoiled little bitch don’t even care about you,” she told the creaking ceiling. I’ll bet she got nice tits, though. Randy thought to herself, beoming more drunk, her eyes widening to the cold blue glow of the TV. The house creaked louder. Randy clanged the beer bottle down on the side table and paced around the chair before grabbing up the puzzle from the floor where Mya had left it. She shoved it in her backmost pocket. “It’s bout that time,” she proclaimed to no one. mya opened her eyes to the dim morning light of the early fall, finding herself alone in her bedroom. Her first thought in the morning was always the same: Aryan. What pulled her from bed each morning was the anticipation of the joy of meeting her horse and riding her through the seemingly endless fields. If she was no longer in love with Helen, she would always at least hold a spark of profound obligation for granting her that gift.

Mya dressed herself and walked down the creaking wooden stairs, pausing in the living room where Randy and Helen sat, Randy on the couch in front of the television and Helen sipping coffee near the window reading the newspaper. “Hey, I’m going out,” she told them waving, beginning to head toward the door.

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Randy turned away from the television. “Hold your horses a minute,” Randy said smiling. “I’ve been waitin for you to get up. I got something for you.”

“What now? Another puzzle?” Mya asked, folding her arms to her chest.

Randy stood, picking up a half empty beer from the side table, and motioned for Mya to follow her into the dining room.

“Aint it a little early for that?” Mya asked, nodding at Randy’s beer.

Randy took a sip from the bottle. “Hell girl, it’s nearly noon.

You slept late. Come on in here, I got something to show you.”

Helen glanced up as the women left the room, then returned to reading the paper.

Two full minutes passed from the time Helen glanced up from the news to the moment her concentration was fully broken by the sound of a bloodcurdling scream, which echoed through the house, ringing off the windows, vibrating screeching tones of desperation. Helen shot out of her chair and ran in after them.

Mya stood panting, her mouth agape, her hands holding her hair in fists on either side of her head, staring wide-eyed down at the table. Randy stood on the other side, one hand on her hip, laughing gleefully. When Helen ran in, Randy held the beer bottle up, as if in cheers, and took a swig. “What is going on?” Helen hollered, looking quickly back and forth at the two women, expecting to see one of them bleeding, when her eyes finally landed on the source of offense.

On the wooden dining room table lay three chains, each chain singular, separate, unentwined from the other.

“Told ya I was a savount,” Randy said smugly, winking at Helen.

“You? You got it apart?” Helen asked, picking up one of the chains and inspecting it.

“Does the Pope shit in the woods? Hell yeah, I got it undone.

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watched Helen’s eyes to see if she would be as impressed with her as she was with her weird little girl.

Helen took Mya by the shoulders and shook her excitedly.

“Look. I am living in this house with two geniuses.” Helen said, attempting to wake Mya from her devastated state. “Look!”

Mya’s hands finally unballed themselves and let go of her hair.

She continued to stare, dazed, down at the evidence of the broken enigma in front of her. Yet, even as the proof of this death lay spread out like a patient dissected on the table, she could not shake the pressing feeling that there was still some mystery existing there.

“I’m looking. Yeah, I’m seeing, but I aint believing.”

“What do you mean you aint believing it? It’s right there in front of you, clear as shit, girl,” Randy boomed.

Mya shook her head no. “What’d you do, call your carny friend and ask him how it’s done?”

“Hell no!” Randy slammed the bottle down on the table. “And I resent that. Carnys are like David Hasselhoff. They don’t give away their secrets.”

Helen squinted her eyes at Randy. “You mean Copperfield?”

“Whoever. Those magicians.”

Mya leaned over the chair placing her hand on the table and glared at Randy. “You got it apart? Fine! Sure you did. Now put it back together then.” She smacked at the chains, sending them sliding over to Randy.

Randy leaned in over the table as well. “You threatening me?”

“No. I’m challenging you. I don’t believe you done it. I don’t know how. Maybe you got someone to do it for you. I don’t know.

But you can barely tie your shoestrings. Yer dumb as mud. Aint no way.”

“You little bitch!” Randy scooted around the table, balling her fists, heading fast toward Mya. Mya stepped back. Helen ran up to Randy and pushed her away. “Are you gonna let her talk to me that way?” Helen held her back as Randy attempted to push forward.

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solved puzzle. It’s okay. It’s only puzzle. You should be proud, not jealous.”

Mya pinched her face and balled her fists at her side. “You don’t honestly believe that? You believe that, yer as dumb as her!” Mya shouted.

“Mya. Stop talking this way.”

“Yer just pissed I’m smarter than you and everyone knows it!”

Randy shouted back, stepping again toward Mya as Helen struggled to hold her in place.

Mya waved her hand in the air. “Oh yeah? You got it apart. So put it back together now! You should know how.

That’s the whole beauty about puzzles, once you take it apart it gives you the key for putting it back together!” Everything she said now came out at the level of a manic screaming.

“Mya!” Helen chastised, shocked at the girl’s level of anger, “What’s got hold of you?”

“Oh I’ll get it back together. Then it’s your turn, you little snot.

But I’ll get it back together,” Randy told her, cocking her head proudly.

“I’d like to see that!” Mya screamed, smacking at the wooden dining chair, sending it crashing to the floor. She turned and ran out.

“Oh I’ll do it! Then it’s your turn!” Randy hollered after her.

The screen door slammed hard leaving the women in silence.

Helen let go of Randy’s shoulder and returned the dining room chair to an upright position.

“Well hell,” Randy said taking a chain link around her finger and swinging it, “I didn’t know it’d get her panties in a wad that bad.”

Helen sat down in the chair dejectedly, resting her aching head in her hand. “This is enough with the puzzles. This is children’s shit.” She pounded her fist on the table. Randy raised a brow and finished off her beer.

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was spoiled. Always gotta win every little thing or or she throws a fit.”

Helen raised her weary eyes to Randy. “I am not saying she acted right. She is young now. But that is the one I want to marry.

You could at least try . . .”

“Try to do what? Huh?” Randy tossed her hands in the air. “I been nothing but nice to her, buying her things, playing her little games with her. It aint me acting a muck.” Helen sat back stretching out and tossing a large sigh and groan into the air. Randy’s face fell momentarily into seriousness. Randy pointed her finger at Helen. “Hey, I don’t want to be messing up your life. Maybe it’s about time I get going. You just give the word. Don’t know where to, but I always find a place to stay. Anyway, I’m all healed up.” She patted her chest assuringly.

A long moment of silence passed as Randy stood over Helen waiting for a response. Helen gave none. She reached across the table, grabbing two chains and began turning them over in her hands. “This looks . . . not possible. How you did this?”

“Yeah, you see that? I told you. I’m as good a bet as her.” Helen sucked her bottom lip as the notion of Randy being a good bet passed through her. Helen was somewhat aware, although she had never fully admitted it to herself, that she was keeping Randy around as a backup plan. This puzzle, she thought, might be nothing more than Randy’s way of proving to her, however asininely, that she was better than a backup plan.

Randy pulled a chair out and sat across from Helen. “It aint impossible.” She leaned in and fingered the top link. “It’s just about the way they connected, the three of them interlocked. It’s a special way to do it is all.” She sucked her bottom lip coolly. “Gotta have the right touch.” Randy leaned closer, sighing.

Helen leaned away from her quickly. She turned and looked out of the room, trying to glean something from the living room window. “I guess she is gone off on her horse now.”

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hands to her stomach tensely. “She’ll be back,” she almost yelled.

“Got to. Aint eaten nothing yet.” Helen kept looking away. “Hey now,” Randy continued, “I only done this cause I thought she’d like me better if she seen us more as equals, you know if we had something in common. That’s what I thought.”

“Well, you put your heart in the right place.” Helen stood. “I got to start getting things together. I have a week on the road coming in three days. I hope you two won’t killing each other while I’m gone. That’s what I hope.”

“Don’t you worry about that. I won’t do nothing to that little girl.”

“It’s not you, so much, I am worrying about.” it was well into the middle of the night, about to meet early morning when Mya returned. She crept up the creaking stairs like a criminal in her own home, hoping not to alert Helen to her presence. All this open empty space, she thought, was making her feel almost as isolated and insane as she had when she was sent back to live alone in the country with her grandmother. She wanted to slip stealthily into her room and sleep off the trivial absurdity her life had become. But when she reached her room, the door was standing part open and she noticed through the crack, the flicker of a well-burned candle as well as the sound of Helen’s steady snoring.

The woman was waiting for her, asleep in her bed.

Mya turned and tiptoed back down the stairs, heading toward the living room, her mind set on sleeping on the couch. She flipped on the dim orange lamp beside the chair and went to arranging the cushions when an image of the object of her obsession invaded her thoughts. She peeked into the dining room and approached the table, hoping to take one last look at the dismantled chains.

But on the table, she found, to her horror, the puzzle reformed.

The three chains were now linked together, the three links on both ends reconnected perfectly as they had originally been. She cradled the puzzle in her hands. “How the hell is she doing this?” she

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whispered to herself. Tears welled in her eyes. She wiped them away with her arm. Why was this getting to her so badly? “Now it’s my turn,” she mumbled. She made her way back to the couch, the chain puzzle in her hands, cradling it like a baby, curling, and fell quickly to sleep.

But she was soon woken by Helen nudging her to come upstairs to bed. “Why are you sleeping down here? Come upstairs.” Mya rubbed her bleary eyes. The first things that came into focus were the fuzzy brown windmills printed on the couch cushions. This was the same print as her uncle’s couch, she remembered from her childhood. There was something familiar about the things that surrounded her, and that familiarity was horrible.

“She done gone and finished it. She sure did,” Mya said sleepily.

“Who finished?”

Mya dug in the cushion and produced the chain puzzle. Helen snatched it from her hand and tossed the thing aside. “Forget this nonsense and come to bed with me now.”

Mya sat up and shoved Helen away. “I aint coming nowhere with you. I just want to be alone.” She collected the puzzle from the floor and made for the stairs. Helen followed after her, pleading with her to calm down and go to bed with her. But when Mya reached her room, she slammed the door in Helen’s face and locked it tight from the inside. Helen pounded on it for a few minutes, but Mya didn’t answer. She finally gave up and decided it was best to let the girl sleep off her anger.

She turned down the hallway back to her own room. But in the other direction, Randy’s door lay half open. What was it in her that could not stay alone? It was the house that did this to her, she told herself. The house was too big. Alone, her room was too empty. But it was more than that too. She turned left, and pushed open Randy’s door. Randy curled on her side with her back to Helen. She grimaced when she heard Helen enter, but something leapt in her too. She’d heard Helen banging on Mya’s door. She hoped against hoping that Mya wouldn’t let the woman in. But 298

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now here she was, the second choice to a woman who should have been hers forever long ago. Helen couldn’t see that girl was making a fool of her, and that with her, Randy, they could have a real life.

But why would Helen ever choose her first, an old dyke with a face full of lines and two tits chopped off ?

Helen laid stealthily in bed beside her, without touching her, pantomiming trying not to wake her. Randy shifted, telling herself to tell Helen to get out, but finally, silently turning over and placing her arm below Helen’s head. Without speaking, Helen turned to face her. Randy tugged on Helen’s hair and placed her lips on her mouth. They moved there, slowly at first, inside a darkness that was more than the country night, but that was made up of concession, guilt, and the cloaked, wondering abandonment of all hope for goodness. in the morning helen went again to Mya’s room and banged on the door. She’d decided that Mya needed to start following a more regular schedule. Not eating a proper breakfast in the morning was bad for the mind. She would insist that she sit down and have some juice and at least a piece of toast before seeing to Aryan, and maybe today they would greet the horse together, spend some time outside, away from Randy and all the aggravation that was threatening their peace. But when she got to Mya’s door it was hanging open and the room was empty. Helen’s heart pounded.

She stepped inside the room and opened the dresser drawers.

Mya’s clothes still rested in them, crumpled in little nests which seemed to indicate some disorderly order. For a moment, Helen began folding the things, unthinkingly, then realized Mya would notice and be upset she had been rummaging through her drawers, so she took the folded clothes and wadded them again; tried to mess them correctly back into their original piles. Randy passed in the hall. Helen sighed deeply, telling herself Mya would be back soon enough. Her things were still here.

The day went quietly on. Helen paced and cleaned the house

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here and there where there was nothing really to clean but dust from empty spaces that had nothing to do but collect dust, watching out the windows every half an hour for several minutes at a time to see if Mya was coming back or passing through any of the nearby fields. It was a quietly obsessive watching. Randy sat on the couch staring at the television and sipping at her beers, occasionally moaning out, “She’ll be back. Don’t let it chafe your crawl.”

But Mya did not return all day.

At midnight, Randy stood in the doorway of Mya’s room watching Helen who sat on Mya’s bed attempting to read a book.

“What you going on about her for like this? Let’s just get some shuteye.”

“You go on.” Helen told her.

Randy nodded, anger lighting her eyes where Helen wasn’t looking. “Fine then.” And she left to her room, closing and locking her door. Then standing up from the bed after five minutes, unlocking it and opening it a crack, just in case, pathetically.

Helen sat awake, starting at every creak the old house gave, hoping it was Mya returning, twisting her fingers through the coarse matter of waiting that can only manifest in the malleable and undistinguishable hours of the night.

She had finally turned the pillow over so many times that, even for the cold season, it was hot on both sides, when she started at what she immediately told herself was just another noise of the house settling, but to her mind’s contentment, continued toward her, showing itself to be the unquestionable sound of her lover growing near.

Mya stepped into the room and flipped on the light. Helen sat up on her elbows, embarrassed to be caught in such a state of anxiety. She attempted to find her dignity, but unfortunately was only able to toss out a word of indignation, “Where you’ve been?

You just go off all day without eating or telling anybody where you are going?”

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of the world and tossed the chain on the bed. “That there is an impossible thing. And what the hell you doing in my bed, anyway?

You got your own, don’t you?”

Helen felt a heavy ball of anger drop through her from her mind, past her chest, into the bottom of her stomach. She stood and bolted toward the door, suddenly pinning Mya against it.

“You will not speak to me that way in my house. Do you hear?”

Mya eyed her warily, giving no response. Tears began to come to Helen’s eyes. She placed her hand on Mya’s chest and pressed her harder against the door. “You know what I want for you? I want to make you my wife. You know that, don’t you?”

Mya shook her head only slightly. Her expression remained cold and uncaring even as she felt something beginning to tremble, unsure if the trembling was Helen’s or her own. “This is a hell of a way to propose. You want me so bad, but you like a pinball, when one hole close, you just go on and find another. That’s some wife life. You think I don’t know what you old ladies doing around here all day? Old ladies in this big old house want me to rot in here with you. You think I’m a genius, then she’s a genius, then you gotta be with whover being a genius. This is gross as mud in a pig pen. She’s an idiot and you as dumb as that mud too if you think me and her’s the same. But I guess one’s really good for you as another. You aint got no pedigree, yerself.”

This struck a vital chord in Helen, and for the first time in her life she understood the news stories she had read of people killing their lovers. She’d read hundreds of them and always had the same thought. Why, she’d wondered, didn’t they just leave when the love was gone? But she now realized that would be somehow too easy and not at all the answer to the question of this problem. “What is it?” she asked, her voice now deep and threatening. She grabbed Mya tight and, pinching her by the wrist, led her to the bed. “Is it the fuhcking puzzle?” She grabbed the chains and shook them in Mya’s face. “You know what I think? Fuhck the fuhcking puzzles!”

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now!” she growled, twisting her wrist, but Helen held tighter, grabbed her by the other arm and shoved her down on the bed.

Mya squealed. Helen fell on top of her taking hold of her head by the hair and pulled up her black skirt, trying to put her hand inside.

“And fuhck you. She whispered into Mya’s breathless face, tears streaming down her own cheeks. “You say yes and no, yes and no.

Fuhck you. You want to get fuhcked now? Is that what you want?”

Helen moved her hand toward Mya’s ungiving place in desperation, grabbing, pushing and waiting for it to give. Something in her even expected it to give, to begin following, thinking something in Mya was secretly desperate too, needing to be taken. But it was not and did not begin to give. After several horrible seconds, Helen realized what it was she was actually doing, let go of Mya’s hair, pulled her hand away, and fell to her side, sobbing.

Mya laid staring up at the white cracked ceiling, limp and hating each shivering sound of Helen lamenting beside her. Helen’s hand took her by the shoulder and shook her. “Look at me, Mya. I’m sorry. Look at me, Mya deavutchka.” But Mya did not move.

Helen stood and quit her crying; she wiped her tears from her eyes, her entire body visibly shaking. “Those stupid puzzles!” She took the chain and threw it clanging to the floor. Mya continued to lay motionless on the bed. “You know girl, you are not a perfect one either,” Helen told her. “Maybe the thing you think you hate about Randy is a thing about you that you hate that you are pretending to see in her.”

At this though Mya sat upright quickly and stared daggers into Helen. “What I hate,” she spat out, “is you seeing something from her that I hate and thinking it’s in me, and you seeing something that I love from me in her, who I hate. You seeing something the same in us that you think is the same that aint there. And what that means is you don’t really see nobody for real, and I’ve been letting you look real deep into me. And I know, God don’t I know, if you let people who can’t see you look at you long enough, you gonna disappear for real. That’s what I know.”

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Helen shook her head and looked ashamed. “No Mya, I see you both.”

“No you don’t.” Mya said belligerently.

Helen fingered the door handle. “It’s time to grow up. You might not love me now. But that isn’t meaning you can’t love me again. I take care of you. I give you everything. You aren’t even being grateful. You aren’t going to be disappearing anymore. You tell me when you go, where, and how long you’re being gone.”

“You can’t keep me here.” Mya said like a spiteful child sticking its tongue out.

“Keep you here? I have given you . . . ” Helen balled her fist and stepped toward Mya, then stopped herself quickly in the middle of the bedroom floor. “I give you everything. And I tell you what,” her face was red and her body trembling hard again, “I can keep you here if I want to. I don’t care. You get out then. I came up to tell you I am gone day after tomorrow, so you come say goodbye tomorrow, and then you tell me then if you want to stay then. I won’t keep you here.” She turned quickly and slammed the door behind her so hard it shook the walls of the room. mya woke late in the day to an empty house. Helen’s car was

not in the driveway. Randy’s room was empty and she was nowhere around. They’d gone out together. Mya found a note in the kitchen that read, “Mya, we being back later tonight. You see, I am treating others how I like to be. —Helen.” She crumpled the paper and tossed it in the trash.

The kitchen clock showed twenty minutes after three. Mya grabbed a log of salami and a jug of orange juice from the refrigerator and began gnawing at it. “They gone, huh?” she said to her reflection in the window, mumbling through a mouth of salami. “Good. Good to know how long they gonna be gone.

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cause I don’t want them to know how much time they got to do it in, you damned Ruski,” she mumbled as she pushed on Randy’s bedroom door, but it didn’t go. She sat down the jug of juice and turned the knob. It was locked. “Aint nothing that ever stopped me before,” she said to the door. “Yeah Randy, you should know, us savounts have our ways. You should know that, you is one.”

Mya took a hulking bite from the meat log, wrapped the paper around it and laid it on the dusty wooden floor. She reached into her mess of black hair and produced a bobby pin, which she bent and twisted then jammed into the keyhole. In two minutes’ time, the door was open.

On the wall above Randy’s bed hung a large Budweiser beer ad; a glossy poster of a woman in a silver bikini standing in front of snow mountain peaks, her own peaks, bare except for silver strings that covered the nipples, seeming to float in front of her like two helium balloons, not body parts, her head flung back in some state of shock and joy, as she held the squirting beer bottle, the nozzle shooting away from her chin, seeming to have erected itself and ejaculated from her cleavage. Aside from this, the walls were bare.

On the floor were strewn many dirty white socks, a pair of jeans, and a few empty beer bottles. The bed was unmade and a copy of the most current TV guide lay open at the foot.

“Let’s see what you been up to.” Mya kicked some bottles around and began pulling open the dresser drawers rummaging through Randy’s T-shirts and underwear. “Nothing.” She went over to the closet, but it was empty except for a large purple strap-on and dildo that hung from one hanger. “Oh gawd. I never needed to see your dick,” Mya hollered, slamming the door back closed. She looked around the room. “That can’t be all of it.” Mya sat down on the bed and bounced through her thoughts. In a moment, her bouncing stopped and a knowing smile spread on her face. “I’ll betcha,” she said nodding, and swung herself around, her feet in the air, head on the floor as she peeled back the off-white sash and peered beneath the bed. “Gotcha!” Mya grabbed hold of the end 304

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of the long forest-green toolbox that took up most of the space below the bed, and pulled it out into the dust-filled afternoon light. the thumb is not devious. The hand is not underhanded. It

is not the skill of the eye that crafts. But the human heart, even without the hand, thumb, eye, would invent its own extension for deviation. The human heart, in its capacity for complex love, has very little other purpose besides deviation. The heart is inherently devious as it seeks to win those things that to our minds are barely extant, and so it must divine new tools to trap them: the prideful gaze, a moment of abandon, another’s trust or pining. mya sat like a snake coiled on the dining room table. It was pouring down rain outside. Randy and Helen stepped through the front door at half past eight. “Well look who decided to come out and join the living,” Randy hollered, tossing her bag on the floor.

“It’s wetter out there than a hootchy-cootchy.”

“Are we feeling better?” Helen asked stepping slowly toward the dining room. “What are you sitting up there on the table for?”

Mya smiled big, but kept her silence, her arms folded proudly across her chest. She watched happily as Randy disappeared into the kitchen then reemerged with a beer in her hand, crossing in front of Helen, on her way, Mya assumed, to the television. “Hey there, Randy,” Mya said.

Randy stopped and turned. “Well, hey there.”

“What are you doing up there?” Helen placed her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Are you all right?”

“Oh I’m better than all right. I’m swell.” Mya smiled bigger and nodded at them. “Mmmmmm hmmmmm. I’m grand!”

The two women stared perplexedly from the living room. “Why don’t y’all come in here for a sec. I got something I think you oughta see.”

“I think she done flipped,” Randy mumbled to Helen as they walked cautiously into the dining room. “What’s up?” Randy

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asked, taking a swig of her beer then burping as Helen leaned an elbow on the chair beside her.

“I did it!” Mya squealed gleefully.

“Did what?” Randy asked, her voice suddenly deep and serious.

“The puzzle?” Helen cheered. “You did the puzzle? Good.

Now we can be done with this. Last puzzle. Everybody won.”

Mya smiled big as she could, bursting all through with joy. But her smile, to Randy, looked like a big cat baring its teeth. “Yep, I sure did,” she said, nodding her smile, nearly laughing from pleasure as she tossed the three chains, now separate, onto the tabletop.

They made a clanging like heavy bells as they landed. That clanging was followed by the sharp sound of Randy’s beer bottle falling to the floor. Randy’s mouth hung open as she stared down at the chains.

“That’s impossible,” Randy let hiss from her lips.

“No now,” Helen said, now shaking Randy’s arm to snap her out of her shock. “You know Mya would do it eventually, didn’t you? Come on you two. The nonsense is over now.”

“Aw no. It aint quite over yet,” Mya chirped, cocking her head.

“I still gots to put them back together, don’t I, Randy? Oh, but I’ll get it done. Oh, sure I will. Just like you done.” Helen was confused by the menacing tone behind Mya’s broad smile.

Randy shook her head no slowly, still staring at the chains.

“That’s impossible,” she said again in a whisper.

“What’s that, hunn?” Mya cupped her hand to her ear. “You say that’s not possible?”

Randy’s arm fell to her sides. She looked Mya in the eye. “Well, all right.” There was a nervousness to her of a woman accused.

“You got er done. Good for ya.”

“Uh uh.” Mya tilted her head and pinched her eyebrows, feigning a question. “You just said that’s impossible. Why is that impossible, do ya think? You done did it.”

Randy folded her arms and squared herself. Her face was drained of color, her cheeks pulled tightly down as if the weight 306

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of the world had got tangled up in the hull of her expression, and her bottom lip quivered slightly. She shrugged her shoulders.

“What is going on now?” Helen asked nervously.

Mya swung her legs down to the floor and stood at the end of the table. “This aint no puzzle. This is a trick.” From a bag under the table she produced a bolt cutter and soldering gun and placed them on the table.

“You broke into my room,” Randy shouted, grabbing up the bolt cutter and shoving it into the back of her pants.

“Yeah, I broke into your damn room. You know what she did?

She just got some damn chains and solderered them together, then cut em apart then solderered them back together again. I guess it was smart though, cause you polished em down all nice and shiny so I wouldn’t notice. Damn, that’s a lot of thinking to do. You must be tired.”

Helen looked to Randy for some sort of answer, her face showing disgust.

“Oh come on now, you two,” Randy told them. “It was just a joke. I’m just playing around. You figured it out. So? It was fun, that’s all. What’s the big deal?”

“Fun?” Mya screeched. “Fun! You are driving me crazy with this. I’m going crazy here in this house with you playing weird mind games with me.”

“Mind games? Aw, come on. It was just a joke. Calm down.”

Mya stepped forward, her body shaking, her eyes pinched in anger, tilting her head up to Randy. “You think it mattered to me that I could do those puzzles? It aint nothing. I always been able to do that. Something to pass the time is all. You’re the one make a big deal about it, cause you aint nothing but mindless trash and you can’t stand to see no one being above you, so you tried to show me that I aint nothing special, too. That I aint nothing special, like you. That’s what you were doing. It weren’t no fun. But you, you are just mindless trash and that’s all you’ll ever be, just like I known from the beginning.”

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“Mya!” Helen shouted, “you are saying too much now, you are going too far.”

Randy held her hands up, “Naw, let her talk. She’s saying what she really feels. She thinks I’m trash, but I already know that.” Randy turned back to Mya who swallowed hard through her heavy breathing, her chest out, her hand on her hips. “Sure fine,” Randy continued, “I’m trash?” Mya nodded. “Fine, I’m a trashy bitch. At least I know what I am. Aint nobody knows what you are, you little freak.”

“Stop it both of you!” Helen pounded her fist on the table.

“It’s all right,” Mya said cocking her head. “What she say don’t mean nothing.” A base hate Helen had never seen shone in Mya’s eyes. “Randy just come from weak seed or something. Her daddy was yanking off and her momma sat on him at last minute is all.

You can’t hold it against her.”

Helen let out a long trail of air. Randy smiled big and leaned down into Mya’s face. “You should know all about sloppy seconds.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mya snarled, glaring back.

Helen tilted her head, not understanding.

“Who do you think’s been keeping your woman satisfied when you can’t? Yeah, you can just eat me. Might as well. You basically already have.”

Mya’s face dropped. She stepped back, deflated, her eyes darting from Helen to Randy. Helen now understood what Randy was saying. Her face paled. She shook her head no. “Mya, it isn’t like that,” she tried. “It isn’t meaning anything.”

“Oh, it don’t mean nothing?” Randy nodded hard at Helen, her eyes wide and hurt.

“You think I didn’t know that already!” Mya hollered interrupting their gaze. She picked a chair and slammed it back down, pounding its legs on the floor, then ran around the table, heading out the door. Helen grasped for her, but Mya shoved her off, continuing out of the room. Helen bit down, afraid to hear the front door slam. But instead, she heard the strong stomp of Mya’s boots up the stairs and the slam of her bedroom door.

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a full hour passed before Helen dared come knocking. “Who

is it?”

“It’s me.”

Helen heard the lock click and the door swung partly open. She stepped in and closed the door. Mya stood in front of her dresser.

All the drawers were open. She was picking out clothes and tossing them to the bed where two bulbous cloth bags lay, each half full.

“What are you doing.”

“Packing.” Mya kept her back to Helen.

“Where are you going?”

“Wherever.” Mya crossed in front of her to the bed and stuffed two more shirts into her bag.

Helen sat on the foot of the bed and sighed. “I am going to ask Randy to leave.”

Mya kept her head down, sifting. “Don’t ask her to leave. You’ll be all alone then. I’m the one who’s leaving.”

“You say that now because you are angry. But you wait. I will leave tomorrow and take Randy with me, drop her off at her cousin’s. You stay here and cool down. When I’m back in a week, we talk things over. We will. You’ll see.”

Mya turned and leaned against the dresser. “Helen, I’m tired of fighting. There aint no arguing this. I’m leaving in the morning and that’s it.” She shook her head and looked up to the ceiling. “I had enough.”

“No. It’s cold. It’s November. You will stay here at least until spring. You have nowhere to go to.” Helen stood and approached Mya. One hand gently touched her arm. Mya patted it away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said tiredly, matter of factly. The calm and defeated certainty in her voice broke Helen’s heart.

“You can’t be this upset. You had the same with Jules.”

“I swear to God, Helen,” Mya’s voice was low and raw and exhausted, “You better never say that name again.” She shot arrows with her eyes. “That aint near the same thing. I didn’t keep it secret from you. You didn’t feel like a fool with someone holding Track Two: The Chain

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somethin over you. She weren’t no trash playing mind games.”

Mya turned back to her dresser and pulled a towel and a pair of underwear from the top drawer, then balled them tightly.

“I won’t let you go like this.”

“You can’t keep me here.”

“Yes I can.”

Mya turned back around, facing Helen so close they were nearly touching. “How? You gonna stand in front of the door like you did at the hotel? You can’t lock me up. You know that.” Mya pushed past her again and went to arranging her bags. “You just gotta accept this now. Don’t make it more bad than it already is.”

“You are just upset right now, but you calm down and see.”

“See what?” Mya hung her head back and closed her eyes.

Helen placed a hand on her shoulder, she shrugged it off, disgusted. “Helen, why do you want to keep someone around who isn’t loving you no more?”

“Because you are just upset. But you will love me again like you always did.” Helen stepped beside her, picked up a bag and emptied it on the bed. Her hands were trembling. “Put your things back, and give it time. Time for thinking.”

Mya took the bag from her hands and started refilling it. “Goddamnit,” she said lowly, resigned. “I’m going.”

“No.” Helen grabbed the side of the bag.

Mya let go, stepped back and clasped her hands as if in prayer.

“You wanna make me say it. Fine. I didn’t really want to be here in the first place. I had nowhere else for me and Aryan to go, and I’ve been wanting to get gone again for a while now. I loved you sure, and I’ll always be grateful. But I never cared for you like you did for me. Even if I did start loving you again, as much as I did before, it wouldn’t be as much as you do and it still wouldn’t be enough to keep me here one more day.” She had to turn away from Helen who suddenly looked like a murdered person. She took the bag one more time and kept her head down, repacking it. “I guess Randy’s loving you the way you’re loving me and I probably care for you 310

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as much as you do for Randy. That’s a sad old song, but that’s the song we’re singing. I’m sorry to make you have to hear it so clear.

But if that’s what it takes, then you should know that’s the truth.”

Helen gulped down the most bitter taste. “If you felt that way, you knew how I’m feeling about you. You just kept me on. That isn’t right.” Helen’s face was red. She leaned forward on one arm, and Mya could feel the heat of the angry hurt coming from her.

“You know what that’s called Mya? That’s called using. You are a using person,” she hissed.

Mya snorted and sniffed. She planted her hands on the bed and looked past Helen, waiting, but the foul smell of guilt filled her nose and dried the back of her throat. “Well, maybe you’re right.

But what? Nobody’s perfect.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

Mya bit her lip and nodded. “I guess so.”

Helen smacked her own thigh. “Well,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “I guess that’s that.” She laughed, almost beginning to cry and stood, stepping toward the door. “Is that that?” she asked ironically, her voice squeaking. She pointed a finger at Mya who stood leaning over the bed, her head hanging like a person being whipped. “You are a spoiled child. That is not that. You will see someday, you cannot just treating people this way.” Mya nodded staring down at the bed. Helen shook her finger, hell burning in her eyes. “You will see. You are spoiled.” She opened the door and left the room. Mya collapsed on the bed, holding her bag tightly to her chest and began to sob. mya tossed through the night of restless sleep and waking.

Her drawers were mostly empty and her bags lay packed by her locked door. Not long after the sun rose, Mya woke for the last time and prepared herself to get disappeared before Helen had time to try and stop her again. Her emotions were completely trampled and she wanted nothing more than to be riding on her beloved beast. Even if she had no idea where she was headed, she would Track Two: The Chain

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know that this gray house with its ghastly insanity was behind her.

She dressed, went to the closet, and took out the last thing she could fit into her bags, Jules’s fire sticks. Mya crept down the stairs and out the door.

Below the gray sky she took in the sight of the yard, the water pump beside the porch and the grown-up weeds along the back of the house, the small wooden fence that led to the long flat field. She made her way into the barn, finding it empty. Aryan was usually there waiting to get fed in the mornings, but she was earlier than usual. She dropped her bags, placed her hands to her mouth and called out. It was never more than a few minutes before she was blessed with the sight of Aryan bounding up over the hill after she called. But she was met only with blast of cool wind and the silence of the countryside. A panic lurched in her and she took off sprinting over the field. randy woke to the sound of

Mya pounding on her door.

Randy swung it open and rubbed her eyes wearily. “Where’s Helen?” Mya asked, “her truck’s gone.”

“Hmm?” Randy coughed hard and pounded her chest with her fist. Mya scanned the room which was now clean and empty. Even the beer poster had been removed and a small suitcase lay near the foot of the bed. “I’m getting outta here around eight. Got a friend picking me up. You don’t gotta worry about it now. Happy?”

Randy turned to close the door, but Mya stopped it with her hand.

“Hey! Where’s Helen? I said her truck’s not in the drive.”

Randy let the door hang open and sat back down on the bed, cradling her head in her hands. “What time is it?”

“It’s morning. Do you not hear me?”

She snorted and hacked something up then swallowed it. “Yeah, she said she was leaving real early. She was upset. What do you think? She never even went to bed.”

Mya stood stunned, panic in her eyes. “Randy, where’s Aryan?”

Randy looked up at her and chewed on the inside of her mouth.

“I don’t know nothing about that.”

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“Are you sure? Cause I been looking for her for an hour, and I’m about to blow it.”

Randy shrugged and leaned back. “Hey, Helen was real upset. I don’t know. Maybe the horse wanted to get out of here like everybody else.”

In a swift move, Mya bent, grabbed her ankle, and produced a large knife from her boot. She lunged forward toward Randy, holding it to the woman’s face. “You tell me what she done with her, you hear? I had about enough.”

Randy jumped up and scooted around her, her hands in the air, heading sideways toward the door. “Goddamn, you are crazier than a jitterbug.” Mya stood by the bed pointing the knife in Randy’s direction, feeling there was no way she could really overpower the woman. Randy picked up her bag and flung it over her shoulder. “I’m getting outta here.”

“WHERE IS SHE!” Mya screamed, shaking the knife and beginning to cry.

“Calm down.” Randy held her hand in the air. Mya dropped the knife to the floor and began sobbing, her head hanging low.

Randy felt a suprising pang of sorrow for Mya. She was still just a kid, and that horse meant everything to her, she knew.

“Look,” Randy said, fidgeting with the doorknob, “Helen was real upset and she was mumbling about how she helped you get that horse and she was gonna teach you a lesson.”

“What lesson?”

“I told her to leave it alone, but she was going on.”

“Where’s my horse? That’s all I got. Can’t never leave without her,” Mya sobbed.

“All I know is, she was headed to Tennessee for her truckin, and she was talking about taking Aryan and selling her off at an auction down there.” She waited. Mya kept crying and didn’t look up. “Look. It’s in Knoxville, okay. It’s not that big of a city. There can’t be that many horse auctions. You can probably hitch down there in time and get it back from her. She’s just showing you back.” She waited through the Track Two: The Chain

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silence. “Okay, crazy girl, well it’s been bad knowing you. I hope you have a shitty life.” With that, she left the room and headed down the stairs and out the door leaving Mya alone in the house. aryan was , for mya , a God, a Mother, a Home. Aryan was what moved beneath her, grounding her from the lost lonesomeness that, without the horse, left her floating, flying unattached through a world of distorted passing visions and threatening things. Aryan was the only family she had. She’d lost her mother, her lover, and now her horse. But also, even with every loss, she’d collected gifts. She wasn’t sure what gift would be collected from the loss of Aryan, and she did not accept it yet as a permanent loss, as she was dead set on getting her goddamned horse back come high water or hellfire. And hellfire, she now knew, would always come.

Her mother had left her the gift of the tiger, of knowing when to lunge and when to wait. And Jules had left her the gift of fire and explosion. It was a very special gift, that one. She recalled sight of Jules dancing, the way the flames licked, threatening even the air, reaching to catch anything that might be fool enough to slip, and the explosion at the factory, as well as the satisfaction that came with seeing a loathsome thing destroyed in the moment of splitting a hair, a finger snap and crack, and then, where a monument of torment once stood, only ashes blown by the wind and empty space waiting to be filled with something new.

“Damn your love,” she whispered, her head held high, her throat filling with that familiar sense of satisfaction as she stood, pale in her black tutu, her hair a black mop on her head, the house gray below the gray sky, as the first tongues of orange flame caught the wood and sped around the base where she had poured the gas. It caught and began tapping at the wood porch and creeping up the sides forming a fiery frame around the picture windows of the house. The wind blew.

The flame picked up. Mya turned her back, heading toward the road, away from the rising smoke, away from that horrible house of Helen’s that would come down with the night completely to ashes.

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track three

The Cat Came Back

“ how the hell I end up here, I’ll never know,” she told herself as she pedaled her rusty road bike through the curtain of heat that still hung in the air of the late, August afternoon. “How the hell I end up here, I’ll never know.” But that wasn’t really true at all. She did know. When she thought about it, it all made perfect sense, actually. When she put her life in clear order, there was no other option for where she might have ended up.

The house sat back a ways from the small country road that wound its way sleepily through the town populated by its threehundred tired inhabitants. She giggled when she saw the sign propped up against the junker car, which seemed to be growing from the dirt patch that was the lawn.

Free Kittens For Sale (Free!!!)

Cindy laughed out loud as she read it, a cloud of dust trailing behind her thin wheels, the grocery basket jiggling on the handlebars. Earlier that morning, she’d stopped at this house on her way out of town. There were almost as many dirty kids as there were flea-ridden kittens then. Four of them, breathing through their eyes, every one, she thought. But it wasn’t just kittens they’d been selling that morning. A man was there, a beanpole-looking sort, in overalls and covered in dirt as well. He had brought some 315

produce and was selling tomatoes and things as part of the yard sale the four eye-breathing kids and their disabled old grandma were holding. The grandmother sat up by the porch, a mound of a creature seated in an electronic wheelchair, hooked up to a breathing machine. Her white dress was slightly yellowed matching the color of little flowers that patterned it. On a table in front of her sat a spread of whatnots, angel and Indian figurines, an old purse, a top hat, and some romance novels, all marked fifty cents. Cindy bought two tomatoes and an apple from the young man, but did not stop to look at the old woman’s spread, cause ever since she could remember, handicappeds gave her the creeps. She stopped by the where the kids were sitting and took a gander at the kittens.

A cardboard box bedded with torn towels held six kittens looked over by the dirt-crusted children, three boys and a girl. She reached down and tapped one on the nose, a kitten that is.

“You gonna buy one?” the youngest boy asked. He looked to be about six years old. He wore a dirty pair of swimming trunks and a stretched jersey too big for his size, bearing the number 69.

But he was smiling and bright, unlike the three other children. She could see how they had come out, one little miracle right after another. Plop. Plop. Plop. Like apples from an overripe tree. The two other boys were identical twins, somewhere near nine, and the girl couldn’t be a day over ten. The twin boys wore matching bluejean overalls. One sported a gray-cotton tee underneath and the other’s chest was bare, smooth and smudged with dirt. He chewed an apple slowly with focused attention.

“Well, I thought they were free.”

“They are free,” the youngest one told her, pointing back to the sign.

“Then, hunny, I wouldn’t be buying one, would I?” Cindy asked.

The others had been completely silent before this statement, but somehow they seemed to grow more silent. The youngest boy slanted his eyes in confusion. The others’ eyes were looking slanted at her too, with their thin lips pressed flat, and their faces dead 316

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set, expressionless, a look she would have found more fitting on very old people, old people who had spent their lives contemplating existence on a dark mountaintop. “You get what I mean?” she asked. The small one shook his head no at her, twisting his body in spastic motions as he did, full of childish energy. “You gotta fix yer sign,” she told them. “You-uns spelled for wrong.”

“Nuh uh, we did not,” the young one hollered, smacking his fist down on the table like a judge. “In school, he won the bee and that’s why he’s the sign maker,” he told her proudly, pointing to the twin with the apple.

“Well, good for you. But that there is the number four, sweetheart.” She gave them a smile, but except for the youngest, there was no friendly emotion on any of their faces. “Oh well, it don’t matter anyway, I guess. Those kittens are cute enough, they’ll sell themselves.”

“So, you’re taking . . . this one.” The youngest boy pointed to a little gray and white calico-patterned thing. His sister scooped it up and held it, her arms outstretched, toward Cindy.

“Oh no, hunny. I was just saying hi. I can’t take a kitten. I’m a bird-girl. Birds and cats don’t mix.”

The young one hopped from his chair and made his way to the side of her. “Sure they do. They mix. Mix all the time,” he told her, nudging her toward the kitten like a tenured salesman. The girl held the kitten up higher toward her and shook it for effect. What effect, Cindy wasn’t sure, but it reminded her of something she’d seen in a Pentecost church once. The girl seemed almost angry.

Her eyebrows pinched together in the center of her forehead as she shook the cat at Cindy. Cindy patted it on the head. “It is a cute little thing, but I can’t take it.” The other kittens squirmed in the box and made cooing noises. “If I hear of anyone wanting a cat though, I’ll send them your way. What’s your name, doll?”

The girl brought the kitten back down and cuddled it to her chest, pouting. “Rebecca.”

“And I reckon you two are twins?” The two boys just stared at Track Three: The Cat Came Back

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her with their slanty eyes and pressed lips, and Cindy was sure she could hear them breathing through the corners of those slanted eyes. It gave her a shiver all down her spine. One spit an apple to the side.

“They don’t talk to strangers,” Rebecca told her, replacing the cat to the box. She laid her hands on the table and leaned forward, spreading her lips in an affected smile. “Maybe if you buy a kitten, they’ll talk to you. Then you wouldn’t be a stranger no more.”

“You’d have adopted family,” the youngest boy added from her side.

Something about the manner of the girl’s lean, the stretched pink dress that hung too low on her shoulders nearly revealing her prepubescent nipples, and the sight of such a young child affecting a smile, not even to sell something but to give it away, gave her a second shiver down her spine. That was two too many shivers for Cindy. She swung her legs over her bike seat. They were just kids, just some weird little kids trying to learn how to sell things for free.

“Aw well, you kids sure are sweet,” she said, not meaning it at all, smiling an affected smile herself now too. “I’ll be sure to send anyone looking for a kitten your way. Bye now.” She pedaled off, the sound of their eyes exhaling disappointment behind her. the sun was going down and the box sat empty below the sign.

She guessed they must have finally given the cats away. But she wondered to whom. It wasn’t a heavily trafficked road. Her house was nearly a mile beyond that house, seated in the little town. The town was small enough as it was without living a mile away, surrounded by cornfields, no neighbors or anything. It couldn’t be good for kids. Cindy was happy for her little street and the few interactions she’d had since moving here six months ago. The last month she’d even started enjoying the nightlife of her neighborhood.

His name was Travis. His house sat catty-corner to her trailer, across the thin black-tar road, a small three-room setup with a nice front porch he made use of every night just as the sun went down,

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sipping his endless beer and strumming his guitar, like clockwork, like the laziest clockwork she’d ever seen. She’d started timing her dinners by it weeks before. When she heard the opening chords to “Sweet Home Alabama,” or maybe it was “Stairway to Heaven,” or Travis Tritt’s “Anymore”—one of his personal favorites, she later guessed, because they bore the same name. When those chords made their way through her kitchen window, she set the water to boiling for the pasta, and started the canola oil frying in the pan, cause it was about that time. After dinner, she made her way out to her own stoop and sat, also with a beer in her hand, watching the stars dance above the ghost town, the smell of corn and grass all around her.

He was as slow as he was built, and he didn’t even seem to register her presence the first week, not so much as a sideways glance.

She, on the other hand, could not take her eyes off of him. His hair, although it had receded well beyond his forehead, hung down past his shoulders, dark brown and full of waves. Sometimes he wore a white tank top that showed off his muscles and grizzle.

When there was a chill, he sported a shining black leather jacket, and always his denim jeans adorned by a big gold eagle belt buckle that gave her the feeling she was the lone audience member of a live country rock concert, and this man on his front porch must be, somewhere, somehow, a world-renowned sex icon. Her staring and fantasies went on for a good seven days before he gave any sign of notice. But when he did, it wasn’t a subtle message.

One night, as she sat with her chin propped on her hand, a beer bottle dangling between her legs, just taking in the sight of him like he was a statue in a museum, he turned his full body toward her, met her with his solemn eyes, and gave the strings a meaningful pluck. She had heard him sing the song many times before, but this time, when he sang the words, “I can’t pretend I don’t love you anymore,” he wasn’t a man just making noise at the distance.

He was a lover begging. The twenty feet or so that separated them became nothing, and Cindy was spinning around like she was on Track Three: The Cat Came Back

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a big circular stadium stage, and all the other little houses and the cornstalks and the grass and trees and sky were their auditorium, and the stars were applauding their country rock love song. It might as well have been their song, and he might as well have written it himself, just for her.

When the song was finished, he pulled a beer out of the cooler and held it up. She downed the rest of her own, tossed the empty bottle aside and crossed the little road, her feet melting into the black tar the whole way. The next night, she brought him dinner, a plate of spaghetti and pork chops, and they ate it on the porch and drank the beer, and he played her all the songs he knew how to play and then some. Neither of them had much to say, so they just let the guitar talk for them. The third night, the inevitable happened. After they tired out his old guitar, they went in and tired out his old bed. He fell immediately to sleep after lovemaking. He was a quiet one the first few weeks, and she liked it that way.

It was better, she thought, before he’d started talking. Why couldn’t he have let it lie there, just eating pork chops, drinking beer, singing love songs, and making it? That was fine with her.

Men were better when they weren’t talking. They always thought of some dumb shit to say to ruin everything. One of the first things to come out of his mouth was a proposal of marriage. The last three times they’d been together, he kept pushing marrying her, and she figured he was saying it cause that’s what he thought she wanted to hear. He must have figured a woman nearing fifty was all busting out to get married. But that was about as far opposite what she wanted to hear as anything could be. the sun was going down. She parked the bike by the front

door and went to chopping vegetables in the kitchen. She set the canola oil to frying, but cooking dinner for him didn’t feel sweet this time. Chopping the vegetables wasn’t a peaceful, preparatory act. It wasn’t a calm doing of things. Her motions were erratic and her eyes were narrowing as the clock ticked on. Any moment 320

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now he would show up on her porch like a lost animal begging for something she didn’t have to give. He would show up on her porch and come into her space and eat her food, and not even sing her songs anymore, but just start in talking about marrying her, and the life they could have, and how gorgeous she looked. She couldn’t see any good way out of this.

Voices from outside made her look up from her feverish chopping. She peeked out from her kitchen window expecting to see Travis making his way down her walk. But what she saw gave her yet a third shiver down her spine and she quickly pulled the shades back closed. It was the girl from the morning and her youngest brother, both on bikes. They’d stopped on the road outside her house and were looking around for something, pointing in different directions. Each of their bikes had baskets on the front, loaded full of something covered with rags. She switched her light off.

There was a knock at the door. She didn’t respond, but her birds chirped. The knock came again, followed by Travis’s voice, “You in there, babe?”

She made her way slowly over and opened the trailer door for him, hiding behind it as she did so. “What’s got into you?” he asked.

She peeked around the door. The street was empty. They were gone. Travis came in, flipped the lights back on, and poked around her birdcages. She just had four small ones now, which she’d bought for change at the pet store in the nearby town, a pitiful memory of what was once her life’s work.

She laid slices of Velveeta over the salad and sat the bowl down on the kitchen table. Travis took a seat. “I don’t want to talk about what we’ve been talking about tonight, you hear me?” she warned him.

“What we’ve been talking about?” he asked, a mischievous grin on his face.

“Well, if you don’t remember, let’s just keep it that way.”

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light of dusk fading away through the curtains of the trailer windows as the birds chirped from their cages in the living room.

When dinner was finished, Travis sucked down a cigarette, took her by the hand and led her to the bedroom, without even asking or making a come-on, as if there was no other option for what might have happened after finishing dinner, natural as a bowel movement, unthinking as a sneeze, he led her into the bedroom.

But her mind was on other things. “You know those kids in that farmhouse down the road?” she asked as she sat down on the edge of the bed. Travis took a bottle of whiskey out of his back pocket and started sucking on it.

“Kids?”

“Yeah, there’s four of em. Two of them are twins. They live in that big farmhouse with an old woman.”

“I think that’s Rita you’re talking about. Why? You thinking about having kids?”

“Goddamnit. Stop that. No. Those kids gave me the creeps today.”

“All kids, or just those kids?” he asked, an accusatory expression spreading across his face.

She cocked her head sideways and went to braiding her long black hair. “Now I asked you nicely to stop with that shit, all right?”

He replaced the whiskey to his back pocket. “You brought it up, woman. But don’t worry, I won’t say nothing about nothing anymore.” He crawled onto the bed and pushed his way on top of her, laying her back, pulling her legs up around him. He grabbed her by the hair and kissed her hard while unbuttoning her shirt with the other hand. To her, their lovemaking had always seemed sweet, passionate, or somehow more natural before. This time, it seemed to her that he was wanting it to be a porn video. He pinched her nipples all the time and licked her places he’d never even spoken about in words. He fucked her sitting up on his knees and watched himself go in and out with some kind of weird pride, calling her “mommy” as he did so. At the end, he even pulled out and shot it on her stomach.

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Cindy took some tissues and wiped herself off as he dropped onto the bed beside her and rummaged on the floor for his whiskey. He unscrewed the bottle and sucked down a good inch, then belched. Cindy sat up and recovered the last of his little nation from her bellybutton with a tissue. “Well, never in all my life,” she told him, shaking her head, “never, never, never.”

He sucked something from between his teeth, took another sip of whiskey and belched again. His eyebrow raised and his mouth twisted into that boyish grin, which seemed at the same time infused with a painful ignorance bordering on genuine innocence, accusatory, and malicious. “Never, never, never, what?” he asked in a mocking tone.

She tossed the tissue at the trash can, but missed. “What the hell is going on with you?”

He took another gulp of whiskey and scratched his stomach with his knuckles like a big cat after a kill. “I just figure, if this is all we’re doing, we should at least do it right. Get inventive with it.”

“If what’s all we’re doing?” Her face was pinched and she wanted to smash him in the nose. She was getting what he was saying, but she didn’t want it.

He rolled over on his side, and gave yet another big suck at the whiskey, which was nearly down to the middle now. “Let’s just say it. We both know I wouldn’t even be here right now if it weren’t for the cat.”

The faux-wood wallpaper of the bedroom seemed to spin.

Something in her stomach jumped. “Cat?” she nearly shouted.

“What are you talking about, cat?”

“Cat, woman. The cat.” He pointed between her legs with the bottle of whiskey, nudging the nozzle against her thigh. When the cold glass tip of it pressed against her skin, something in Cindy shattered. Her hand came up and she whacked that man who was as slow as he was built as hard as she could across his stubbled cheek, the red sound of the smack ringing through the room. She saw every muscle in his body flinch forward then quickly restrain Track Three: The Cat Came Back

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itself from reaction. At least he was a real country boy, and hitting girls was still a line drawn too deep in the dirt for him to cross, anyway, it seemed that way for the moment.

Mustering her courage, she looked him in the eye and told him, “You’re getting drunk as a skunk, and your words are starting to smell as foul.”

His face was motionless and his eyes looked all dead, like he was in a trance. She figured every man thing in him was talking itself out of smashing her back in the face with his big fist. All the gears in him were struggling to reverse themselves against the forward motion of physical retaliation, and she couldn’t help but worry something in him might lose that struggle. She didn’t know him well enough to be sure. “That aint right how you’re talking to me,” she said, leaning away from him, scooting up against the wall and showing him her hurt. “There’s more to this woman than pussy.

I guess those love songs you sang me don’t mean nothing if that’s what you think.”

His face was starting to show some sign of life again. His eyes followed her and his muscles relaxed. “What do you expect from me?” he asked, looking down to the side, embarrassed. “You gotta see it. It’s the clearest thing in the world. Except for the guitar and some drinks, you’re all I got, and I just want to make sure I really got you. What’s wrong with that?” He was talking to her but he was looking down at the bed sheets like he was saying it to something that wasn’t there, like he was defending himself to God. “What’s wrong with that, I don’t know.”

Cindy took her pack of cigarettes from the nightstand and lit one. “Travis, I aint ever marrying you. You get that through your head now, once and for all. I aint marrying you, but that don’t mean I don’t love you, and that don’t mean you can treat me like trash either. But if you can’t get that through your head, then I can’t keep doing this no more.”

He stood from the bed and slammed the bottle down on the nightstand. “Goddamnit!” He turned and pounded his fist on the 324

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wall so hard she was worried it might break through the thin facade of the trailer. “Why the hell not? What’s wrong with me? I’m not good enough for you? I got enough from my settlement I’m set to live for life. Not high on the hog, but you wouldn’t have to worry about anything. You want someone younger? Is that it? You’re no duckling yourself, you know.” His nakedness was even more beautiful to her when he was angry. He was built like some kind of a bulking statue, his hair hanging down past his shoulders from a ring of baldness, and all his tan skin had turned red, even the skin on the dome of his head was shining with pinkishness. She took a long drag of her cigarette and folded her arms around her small stomach, giving him a pitying look. “You want to marry another Indian? Is that it?” he asked. “You want a man with a regular job?

You want to move out of this town?”

This was tiring every bone in her body. She saw that he could go on forever making up all sorts of reasons that she might have for thinking she was too good for him. “Travis, I don’t want to marry you or anybody. I DON’T WANT TO MARRY ANYBODY!” She shouted the last sentence, enunciating the words for him as if he might be slightly deaf. He let out a long sigh, plopped back down on the edge of the bed and went at the whiskey again. She stroked his back sympathetically. “Hunny, you don’t want to marry me either. You don’t even know me.”

“I do. I do too want to marry you and then I’ll get to know you,” he said, turning his begging eyes to her, thinking her touch meant she was giving in to the idea.

She pulled her hand away and flicked her cigarette in the ashtray. It was time to be hard. “Travis, I’m not marrying you and that’s that. I seen what it does to people, and I don’t want nothing to do with it. Anyway, I’m not the kind of woman you want to marry. I’ve had enough of living life. I’m content with it just passing by me. You don’t even know me.”

“I know enough.”

“Oh yeah? Did you know I’ve been in prison?”

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She studied the end of her cigarette, not wanting to look at him as her confession sunk in.

“Prison? For what?”

Her words came out in one steady tone, emotionless and scratching from her smoky throat, a cold hard statement, which hung in the air like a neon billboard glowing above them: “Aiding and abetting a kidnapping and accomplice to torture.”

His eyebrows touched themselves in the middle of his forehead.

He just stared at her for a few minutes and she just puffed on the cigarette. “Well, I am about drunk as a skunk,” he finally said, laying his head down on the pillow and closing his eyes, a rapid motion visible below his lids. She put out her cigarette, then the light, and before long he was snoring away. she woke in the morning to find him dressing. He pulled his shirt over his head and gave her a polite nod, like people do to strangers on the sidewalk as she regarded him sleepily from the bed. She followed him to the kitchen and offered him a coffee, which he declined, saying he had to be off. He kissed her awkwardly on the cheek and headed out the door. She stood at the open doorway in her bathrobe, watching as he headed away from her, probably for the last time, she thought. “Didn’t even have a cup of coffee or nothing,” she mumbled to herself. “These men sure are the biggest pussies I’ve ever seen.”

As if in answer, a mewing sound.

Cindy stuck her head out the door. It came again, more insistent this time, a plaintiff mew that could not be mistaken. She opened the door wider and peeked around. Just on the ground beside her stoop, wrapped in a dirty torn towel, was that damned gray and white spotted kitten the weird girl had shaken at her the morning before. It was flopping all over, pushing at the towel with its paws and nose, still too young to have been separated from its mother.

“Well, if that don’t beat it, I guess I’m gonna have to,” Cindy mumbled as she scooped the kitten up in her arms. It pressed a

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small paw to her chest and turned its begging eyes up to her, mewing for its life. The street was empty as always, eerie in the morning light, not a motion to be found, not a sound to be heard except for the steady hum of a tractor coming from the cornfield behind her trailer.

She held the kitten up in the air, looking it in the eyes. “You aint staying!” she told it. It mewed loudly back at her, as if in protest.

“Don’t worry, I aint a monster. I’ll give you some milk. You must have been out there all night, huh? Fuckin crazy kids. I’ll get you some milk, but you gotta go back before you get big enough to eat my birds.”

She sat the kitten down on the kitchen floor and poured some milk onto a plate. It crawled over on wobbly legs and lapped the milk up greedily. Cindy fried herself an egg, sat down to eat it and took to talking to herself over her lone breakfast. “I don’t know why they always compare women to cats,” she said. “As far as I can see, you’re more like men. Always rubbing up against people, always begging just when you want attention, and when you don’t, you’re nowhere to be found. No good for nothing. Can’t get the paper or anything. Sure as hell can’t sing pretty songs like my birds.

Can’t do anything special like fly or even swim.” She chewed the last overcooked edges of the fried egg. “And when you’re all grown from the care I gave you,” she told the cat, “you’ll just start pissing everywhere and tearing everything up and shedding your hair all over the place, and then, to top it off, you’ll kill the only thing that really gives me any pleasure. Hmph. Just like men.” the sun was setting . She’d eaten her dinner alone for the first time in months, no serenade, no country-sex-rock fantasy, just her, the little birds chirping and one unwanted kitten. She pedaled her bike, again, down the dusty dirt road that led to the lone farmhouse. The kitten lie snug in the basket that hung from her handlebars bedded with towels. The cornfields and woods stretched for miles around her. Darkness was falling, and by the

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time she turned around to go home, she would be lucky if she could see four feet in front of her nose, the moon her only light.

The big farmhouse windows were glowing. The long, cascading off-white curtains obscured any view of the inhabitants, but she heard voices coming from inside. She crept up to the porch and deposited the sleepy kitten by the door. “There you go,” she told it. “It’s not that you aint cute. It’s just that I can’t keep you, hunn.”

As she made her way slowly back, trying to recall each subtle turn of the road barely visible in the darkness surrounding her, she couldn’t help but think how alone she was and how big the lonely world. It seemed to her that her entire life could be summed up by this blind lonesome journey, this absurd trek through a pool of darkness. She thought of her time in jail, how the walls had at least given her some endpoint. In prison, she’d known the limits of her journey. After the first year, she began to feel not inhibited but secured by those walls. Now, the darkness surrounding her, like the lonesomeness enveloping her, was another prison, not inhibiting her, but inhabiting her, summoning the possibility of unlimited movement, mocking her general petrifaction when faced with choice, when faced with the unknown. The trees that doubtless lined the roadside made shivering sounds in the wind. Something cawed as the cicadas let out their croaking song.

Then another sound came up behind her, the sound of wheels in the gravel. She turned to look, but saw no lights, no indication of anything in what little of the distance she could make out by the thin light of the toenail moon. She put her head down and pedaled faster. She was about halfway. She told herself just not to look back and everything would turn out all right. But before she could convince herself that this was true, something let out a horrible squeal, and then another accompanied by at least a second voice, and she felt something small fly past her head. She screeched her wheels in the gravel and turned again to look as a pebble stung her cheek.

“You don’t know who you’re messing with!” she shouted, trying to sound meaner than her insides felt. She picked up a handful of 328

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gravel and flung it back at the baying darkness. “I got a gun. I’ll shoot.”

There was silence after this threat, which hung around her for several long seconds. Then another series of squeals, which she began to distinguish as human voices imitating the cry of an unknown creature. But the squeals were going away from her now, further back into the darkness, growing more distant. She remounted her bike and pedaled for her life.

She was panting and sweating hard by the time she made it back to her trailer. She just dropped the bike down under the window and collapsed on the porch for a few seconds, sucking in air, still trembling all over with fright. When she stopped panting and looked around, she noticed with the aid of the streetlight that a piece of white paper had been nailed to her front door. She stood and tore the note from the nail. It said: “But you didn’t do it, did you?”

Everything in her was boiling. She quickly pushed open her front door, grabbed a marker, and on the back of the note, she scribbled, in big red letters: “I DID IT.” She guessed it was the night for leaving things on people’s porches. She ran across the street and slid the note under Travis’s door, then dashed back into her own home, not even lingering a moment to see if she could catch a few bars of him playing some plaintive love ballad through the walls.

She locked her front door tight and downed four shots of whiskey and three cigarettes before falling into a hard sleep. she found herself in her dream, occupying a chessboard.

There were many of her, facing an army of Travises and kittens on the opposite side. She, the real she, was riding a red horse, and someone had stuck one of those old-timey feathers in her hair. She tried to pull it out. It wouldn’t come. When the pieces started moving and she patted the horse to gallop, she felt that the horse was soft, warm, and wet, and her hands came back all covered in red. She realized

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the red horse she was riding was made of blood. All the pieces, all the hers and Travises and kittens, were all moving around, killing each other and making horrible sounds. But she was just sitting there on her red horse, staring at her bloodstained hands, whispering to herself, “Of course, there was enough blood for the horse too.

There’s always enough blood. There’s always enough blood.” when she woke , it wasn’t morning anymore, but it wasn’t

afternoon yet either. She put the coffee on and tried to shake the feeling of the bad dream, but the memory of the night before was also soaked with the same putrid feeling, and although this was a new day, something about the way the heat made waves in the air outside the windows, blurring even the miles of nothingness, of flatland that surrounded her, made her feel like she was still deep in it, stuck at the bottom of the weird, putrid pond of confusion.

She knew that as soon as she opened that door she would know for sure one way or another. Either she’d breathe in the summer air and start her day anew, or like the floodgates, it would all keep pouring in and drown her in the muck she feared she was already tangled in.

How she’d gotten caught up in so much nonsense, she couldn’t figure. She hadn’t done anything except keep still and quiet, still and quiet as the country surrounding her. She thought of that phrase about a rolling stone and moss. But when she had been a rolling stone, she’d gotten tangled up quicker than a ball of twine in a room full of kittens. All she wanted was one man to love sometimes, some space to herself, and some vegetables to go along with dinner. That would have been all she needed from life for the rest of it. Still and quiet. Yet somehow she was all wrapped up in some sticky nonsense suddenly.

She combed her long black hair in the mirror and braided it tight, a thick rope trailing down her spine. “All right,” she said to the nothingness, “give me what you got.” She said this with conviction. But when people say things like “give me what you got” to 330

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nothing, they don’t really mean it. They mean something more along the lines of, “I’m just being paranoid, everything’s gonna be fine.” They say it as a challenge to the void. They say it to challenge the void to answer. Cindy buttoned her jeans tight below her torn T-shirt, momentarily comforted with the unconscious knowledge that, most often, the void does not accept challenges, the void does not answer. belief is a paradoxical thing. On one hand, it is a proclamation of some truth, while, on the other hand, it is an admission of the possibility of that thing’s untruth. People don’t know in God; they believe in God. Their belief in God, or in some sort of structural universe, is a reactionary construction, its foundation being the apparent and consistent evidence of the meaningless void.

On what shifting sands, on what darkness have we built our holy houses? If God appeared on our front lawns every morning, shook hands with us, and sketched out the plan for and revealed to us the divine meaning of each of our days, the holy houses would be built to teach belief in the possibility of chaos. The preachers would preach the transcendence of utter meaninglessness, the divine value of the possibility of autonomy of our actions and existence. Belief is always reactionary, always confessional. The void is apparent and requires no belief, no defense. Not usually. when cindy opened the front door, she found neither the

God nor the void waiting for her, but a thing that is, as a symbol, indicative simultaneously of the most profound meaningless and the most absurd sanctification. And if the void must be filled with something other than meaning, why not fill it with . . . kittens.

Two of them. There were two of them now. The same one as the night before and what she guessed to be its sibling, a little gray thing with a pink bow absurdly adorning its head. Tied to the bow was a small note. She scooped up the kitten, untied the ribbon and opened the note, which simply read, “Think you.”

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She wished she could take back her words. Don’t give me what you’ve got, she thought, just keep it. Keep it for yourself. She stepped into her yard, a kitten in one arm, one still mewing on the porch, and took a good look around. The sun played with the humidity of the air, creating little waves through the distance, the empty street lined with trees, little houses, and trailers, the cornfields extending beyond them, not a soul in sight. And yet the world was speaking. On the back of the door, newly stuck on the nail, she noticed yet another note. She tore it from its perch and read the words, “But it wasn’t your idea, right? You said, aiding and a bedding.” She dropped the kitten to the ground, stomped back inside the house, her face reddening with anger.

She flipped the note over and scribbled her reply. “It was mostly my idea. The aiding and ABETTING was the lawyer’s idea.” She folded the note three times and marched across the street like a soldier, slipped it under Travis’s door, and headed back to her own yard.

“This is the last fuckin day I’m doing this shit,” she hollered at the kitten that was attempting its wobbling way toward no obvious or definite end. Cindy picked her bike up from below her window, with every intention of filling the basket full of her two unwanted furry companions and depositing them right back where they came from, but not in the dead of night this time. Not in secrecy. She was gonna tell those weird kids what was what, once and for all; no means no. But when she picked her bike up from where it lay, she noticed that the tires, to her utter downfall, had gone completely flat. Upon closer inspection, it became obvious that both of the tires had been slashed clear through. “Well, hell,” she muttered to herself, looking from the kittens to Travis’s house and back again.

He wouldn’t have done such a thing, would he? No. It must have been those crazy kids. They were awfully serious about her keeping the cats. Even slashed her tires so that she couldn’t return them.

She started cussing all the cuss words she knew under her breath as she flipped the bike over on its handlebars and spun the wheels.

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Across the street, a screen door slammed and Travis stepped out onto his porch. He just stood there, taking in the sight of her for a moment, preparing himself. He wore a white cotton tank top with those tight, tight jeans ornamented by his gold eagle belt buckle, the sight of which always got Cindy going no matter how hard she didn’t want to be going. She turned from where she kneeled by the bike, a hand on her hip, and just shook her head no, a long sigh escaping her lips in a hiss like air coming out of a tire.

She could swear she saw steam rising from the black tar road that divided them, and it wouldn’t have surprised her one bit to hear the sound of a horn blowing those fateful chords that played in those old westerns right before a showdown. He swaggered like John Wayne down from the porch, taking time with each heavy step before he finally got within a couple feet from her, and stood, looming over her, the man she had first fallen for, the cold and quiet, slow as he was built country boy, who now, instead of speaking, held a note silently out to her without so much as an inkling of emotion tickling even his eyes.

She stood, wiped her hands on her jeans, and took the note. It read, “I forgive you.”

She gave a hard nod. Forgive me, she thought, he forgives me, huh?

They stared at each other for a second. Aggression showed in Cindy’s eyes. She stuck her tongue in the side of her cheek and kept nodding hard at him. Then she reached around and snatched the pen from his pants pocket, scrawled her reply on the back of the note and shoved it to his chest. He read it. It said, “I’m NOT SORRY.” A kitten had found its way to Travis’s foot and was rubbing up on him, falling over. Travis scanned the scene, Cindy’s busted bike, two kittens mewing, and a pink bow on the ground.

He raised an eyebrow. “You got another suitor?” he asked.

Cindy threw her hands up, “Oh Jesus Christ in hell!” she shouted.

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Travis crumpled the note and tossed it to the ground. “Those things gonna eat your birds when they grown,” he told her as he turned, making his way, less like John Wayne than he had come, back to his house.

Cindy went into her trailer and searched around for a bag, mumbling to herself as she rummaged, “Them things gonna eat my birds! Yeah. Everyone and their mother been eating my birds long as I can remember. Everything always eating my birds!”

She returned to the front yard with a cloth bag in hand. One by one, she scooped the kittens up by the scruffs of their necks and deposited them into the bag. They cried and pushed around, then they seemed to find their positions and settled softly in the bottom.

Cindy hung the bag over her shoulder and headed down the road on foot. “It’s a nice day for a walk anyway,” she told herself. it was a nice day for a walk, but it sure took a hell of a lot longer

than it would have if those kids hadn’t slashed her bicycle tires. She was going to put an end to this once and for all. Get it out in the open in the hard light of day. She wouldn’t even feel bad if it ended in them kids getting a spanking after she told their old grandma how they’d been behaving.

It took about forty minutes for her to get there. Her shoulder ached from carrying the kittens, which woke up every ten minutes to cry and wiggle around. She paused for a second at the edge of the drive, scanning the yard. The kids were nowhere to be seen.

Everything was still and quiet, not like memory.

The past was never quiet. Only the present. She couldn’t remember anything in her whole life so still and quiet as this yard of dirt and junk and weeds in this small country town right now. Was that just because she had no reason to recall the quiet moments?

Maybe. But something in her was sure she’d remember this. This stillness was so still it was like an action, stillness as an action, it impacted her so. She sucked in a deep breath and stomped up the steps of the massive old front porch that was peeling paint and 334

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sinking to one side. She pushed her finger into the bell. The ring was a slow, struggling melody that seemed to bounce all around the insides of the house, and she worried it might collapse if she rang the bell a second time before it finished sounding out the tone that went up and down, gong gong gonging, reminiscent of some old children’s folk song she tried to recall. It finally ended. The house remained erect. The kittens wiggled in her bag as she waited for an answer. There was none.

Cindy headed through the yard to the side door and peeked through the window at the empty kitchen. She knocked on the door a few times to no avail. She dropped the bag down on the lawn and made her way over to the large picture window on the side of the house. Standing on the tips of her toes, she pushed her nose up over the edge and peered in. Cindy found herself inches away from the side of the old woman’s head. The window was open. Only a screen divided them. She could hear the steady pump of the breathing machine and the old woman’s struggling gurgle and gasp as she inhaled and exhaled every few seconds.

That grandma smelled like week-old sweat and bedpans. Cindy gasped. The woman turned to look out the window. An oxygen mask covered her face, her nose, and mouth. The hair on her head was thinning and wet with perspiration. Her eyes opened wide at Cindy, and her eyebrows danced around her forehead. She made an awful groaning noise as Cindy shrieked and stumbled backward.

It was not a rational impulse, but she just started running, fast as she could, away from the house. Ever since she could remember, handicappeds and monsters had been in the same category for her.

They were equally terrifying, but as she had grown, she’d realized only one of the two was real.

She stopped running a few yards down the road and found a steady walking pace. Her heart was racing. Everything in her felt hungover, hungover from too many cigarettes and too much whiskey, hungover from the guilt of not being a marrying woman, and hungover from the weirdness that surrounded her and the recent Track Three: The Cat Came Back

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incidents with the kittens. Why had she come back here today?

Why not just leave the kittens out to die or make do, and let the kids alone, just let it go? Maybe she hadn’t, she realized, just been still and quiet. Something in her sure wanted to beat those kids at the game. Something in her sure wanted to teach those kids a lesson. Since the first moment she spoke to them, she wanted to teach those children something.

A few more yards and her mind began to quiet. She told herself she wasn’t doing it anymore. She told herself she wouldn’t react, even if they made another move, she was done playing. But just as she was telling herself this, there they came down the dirt road toward her. She was going into town and they were coming from it, four of them on three bikes, throwing dirt up behind their wheels in the hot noon light. The youngest boy was in the lead on his little dirt bike, pedaling twice as hard as the others. He was wearing a red T-shirt which bore the words “EAT IT!” in big white letters. He was followed by his sister and the twins, the two of whom shared one bike, one boy pedaling in front, the other standing on the bars of the back wheel, holding his brother’s shoulders. She stopped in the road and waited for them. The youngest boy slowed as he came up to her. Cindy waved and hollered something incomprehensible at him, motioning for him to stop. He sped up as he passed, glowering hard. “Hey,” she hollered, “come back here!”

She ran after him for a second, then turned to see the girl coming up. “Rebecca, wait. Stop!” Cindy howled. The girl skidded her bicycle wheels as she passed, throwing dust up in Cindy’s face and the identical boys let out a whooping laugh as they also made their way around her, like a horrible nightmare on wheels, two identical children’s faces cackling at her confused misfortune.

She was right in the middle, halfway between their house and hers.

She turned back and followed after them the way she had come, determined to put the nonsense to an end once and for all. It was a good ten minutes running before she finally made her way near enough the house to see it. The four children were in the front yard. Rebecca 336

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was putting the cloth sack Cindy had left on the lawn into her bicycle basket and was remounting her bike. As Cindy headed for the drive, the other three mounted their bikes, and the girl led them out, pedaling hard. As they came toward her again, in the direction of the town, Cindy attempted to step in front of the girl’s bike, shouting as she did so, for them to stop. The girl skidded her tires and scooted around her and the boys took a detour through the field, one of the twins holding up his middle finger at her as they went.

There she was, out of breath, covered in dust and dirt, watching their silhouettes recede into the distance of noon, watching their silhouettes grow smaller as they made their way, as she knew they would, back to her home.

It took nearly an hour for her to make it back, tired as she was the second and a half time walking the length. Her brain was stirred as whipped cream by the time she made it home and she shuddered to think what she might find as she approached the front of her trailer. There was a new note on the nail. She took it off and opened it. It read, “Marry me anyway.”

Cindy let out a long sigh as her eyes reddened with tears and tossed the note aside. She took the keys from her pocket, unlocked her trailer door and opened it. The first thing she saw was the back door hanging open, creaking as it swung, revealing the miles of endless golden stalks that stretched behind her house. She never locked it. There’d been no need. The second thing she saw was the two kittens mewing in the middle of her living room floor. The third thing she saw was the hammer that struck the overfull vase inside her and sent all of the hurt she’d kept in there to feed her black plant spilling out all over. The doors of her birdcages also hung open, both cages now empty, her birds flown out.

Before she knew it, she was pounding with her fists on Travis’s front door like a wild woman. He opened his door with a smiling, expectant look on his face that quickly vanished when he took in her disheveled state and she demanded, in a tone harsher than she’d intended, “Let me borrow your truck.”

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“What you need my truck for?” he asked.

“Don’t you worry about that,” she told him, “just tell me if I can borrow it or not.”

He outed the cigarette he’d been smoking on the sole of his boot and twisted his mouth up. “Well, that depends. It aint to go visit with no other man, is it?”

Cindy huffed, “There aint no other man. My bike’s busted and I need to pick some things up from the store. It’ll only be this once.

I promise.”

Travis nodded and went and got the keys. He pressed them softly into her hand. Smiling his stubbled smile, he told her, “Don’t have to only be this once. You marry me, that truck’s half yours.

You can use it anytime you want then.”

Cindy took the keys and headed to the truck without response.

She revved the engine and backed out, heading toward the highway that led to the neighboring town. the girl at the animal shelter visibly started when Cindy swung the door open. The sight of her really was something. Sweat had dried along with the dirt and dust, which clung to her face and clothes, a torn T-shirt and jeans, and her waist-long black hair had come undone and was all frazzled, hovering about her like a spider web. Beyond that, there was an air of madness to her, an intense disturbance visible in her eyes.

“Can I help you?” the attendant asked, setting her nail filing aside.

Cindy marched up to her desk and began looking around for something. “You got cats?” she asked, not looking at the woman at all.

The young woman nodded and pushed her bleached blond hair behind her ear. “Yeah, we got cats.”

“Where are they?” Cindy asked, still looking around frantically for something.

“Ummmm, in the back,” the woman said, the sentence going up in pitch at the end like a question.

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“I’d like to adopt some.”

“How many?”

“As many as you got.” they had twenty - three . Twenty-three cats, twelve of them

technically being kittens, plus the two Cindy had back at her trailer, so that was twenty-five cats all together, fourteen of them technically being kittens. The cats she got for free. The cages she rented for transport, loading them in the truck bed.

The fur was flying as she made her way through the little roads of the town. She pulled the truck up to her trailer, the vehicle a veritable zoo on wheels, hopped into the house, snatched the two kittens up and tossed them onto the passenger seat. She sped back down the road before Travis had a chance to notice.

It was now late afternoon, the sun was beginning to fall and everything took on a dim blue haze, the trees, grass, and clutter in the empty yards lining the empty streets seemed to glow indigo.

Cindy wound her way slowly through every street of the town, keeping an eye out for those four little horsemen, those weird kids on their dusty bikes. She wound around for a good hour, even up the road that led to their house and back again before she spotted them. Just around eight o’clock, she noticed their bikes leaning up against the side of the gas station grocery store near the highway, the only store in town.

She pulled in, set the truck in park, clicked the locks down on the doors, and waited. One of the kittens made its way up on her lap, and repeatedly pressed its cold nose to her chest. “I aint marrying you,” she told it. The other cats were crying from the cages piled in the truck bed. If there’d been anyone around to notice, they would have taken a good long gander at the strangeness of it all. But there wasn’t anyone around to notice. There never was.

The door of the store swung open and the two twins stepped out, each chewing an end of a long piece of red licorice. They stopped in their tracks but kept chewing, slanting their eyes at her as their Track Three: The Cat Came Back

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sister and younger brother followed out behind them. Rebecca was wearing a nice blue cotton dress today. The twins still had on their blue-jean overalls, and the youngest boy, who was pushing his way around them and stepping confidently toward Cindy’s truck, was wearing a black T-shirt that bore the words “KISS IT” in big red letters above an arrow pointing down. Cindy smiled meanly and blew him a kiss as she knocked the clutch into reverse and backed out. The youngest boy jogged after her, but she took off driving faster than he could run. He dropped his soda to the ground and mounted his bike, motioning for the others to do the same. Cindy slowed to a creeping pace about a block down the road from them, watching in the rearview mirror as they began their pursuit, just as she had known they would.

“Don’t mess with momma,” she told them in the mirror. “You just kids now. You’re messing with a grown woman. You shouldn’t be doing that.”

The cats mewed. One of them fell from the seat to the floor as Cindy let up on the brakes, then reapplied them. She made her way haltingly up the small road that led to the highway, the kids trailing a few yards behind her. “Here kiddy, kiddy, kiddies,” she sang into the mirror as she turned onto the long highway that led out of town. A few minutes later, they turned onto the highway as well, all four of them pumping their handlebars side to side, trying to keep up with the truck, which was creeping at just under fifteen miles an hour on a sixty-five-mile-an-hour road. A few cars passed, one of them honking a horn and flipping her the bird.

It was eighteen miles to the next town. Between their town and the next, there was nothing but country roads, ditches, cornfields ,and woods. Cindy recalled an article she’d read once in a magazine at a doctor’s office about the cognitive development of children. It said that children are completely engrossed in whatever activity they are participating in. Unlike adults, when a child becomes engaged in an activity, their every thought is completely focused on the doing of that thing, without delineation, without 340

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thoughts of the consequences, beginning, or end results of that activity. That sure did seem to ring true right now, and Cindy was happy for it. Those kids kept on going strong for a good half an hour, showing complete devotion to following her, even as the sun disappeared, leaving them in the pitch country black, the headlights of Cindy’s truck their only beacon. They didn’t seem to be speculating about where they were going, and she wondered what they were planning to do, even if, by some slim possibility, they caught up with her truck.

That was far enough. They were about halfway between one where and another. Cindy and those kids were right smack dab in the middle of a place that could best be described by the eminent phrase “there is no there, there.” And there would be no consolation either. She turned off the highway onto a thin country road that led through a maze of cornfields. They followed her down.

She took another turn, and then another, leading them into the labyrinth of small unpaved roads that wound their way through the woods, not even a streetlight to illuminate for them some semblance of recognition of place, just the shadowed silhouettes of trees lining the dense forest, cicadas singing and the toenail moon.

That oughta just about do it, she thought to herself, letting the truck come to a stop, wanting to savor the looks on their faces.

They were visibly exhausted, but they had gumption. The youngest boy pounded out his last bit of energy, making his way up to the side of her truck. She smiled down at him from the window.

His eyes were wide and his face red as he reached a hand up, as if perhaps about to wave, or possibly to knock, or maybe even he was thinking of attempting to open the door. Cindy smiled big and waved back as she pressed the gas pedal to the floor and sped off, now doing about sixty, leaving them hopelessly in the darkness behind her.

It only took her fifteen minutes to make her way out of the woods, down the highway and back into town. But she doubted the kids would find their way back before morning.

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After passing through the town, she headed down that little road she knew so well that led to their decrepit farmhouse. Cindy turned off the headlights and backed the truck into the yard. One by one, she unloaded the cages below the big picture window where she’d seen the horrible face of the gasping woman earlier that day. She piled some bricks under it and stood on them to get a good view inside. There was no face in the window now. All the lights were out, but, emanating from somewhere unseen, Cindy could hear the awful sounds of the breathing machine clicking and sucking as it pumped air into the lungs of that mountainous creature those four devilish kids called grandma.

With no more than a small struggle, Cindy was able to pry and got the window slid up, all the way open. She picked up the first cage, undid the latches, and like she was unloading laundry into a shoot, she shook the contents, four cats, through the open window, onto the living room floor. A couple of them squealed before landing on their feet, then went to sniffing around and bathing themselves. She repeated this action six times until all the cages were empty and the farmhouse was overflowing. Like the hollowness of her life in this empty town being filled with meaning, the farmhouse was overflowing with cats, the majority of them technically being kittens. She retrieved the last two kittens from the truck, gave them each a pat on the head, dropped them in, and closed the window.

The house sat big as a heartache lighted only by the sliver of moon hovering directly above. Cindy stepped back, taking it into account as she clapped the fur from her palms. For a moment, that old wood house seemed to come alive, seemed to tremble and gasp, seemed to purr and bristle, seething and growing whiskers, unblinded by the darkness. The cat house. she returned the truck to Travis’s drive and left his keys by the front door. She wasn’t leaving him anymore notes. Tonight was the last night for leaving things at people’s houses.

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Inside her own place, for the first time since she’d lived there, she locked all the locks on all the doors and windows. She flipped her porch light on. Before dropping into bed, she rummaged through the back of her closet and found the old twenty-two handgun she’d never used and never wanted to. She checked to make sure the thing wasn’t loaded but laid it on her nightstand, just in case those kids needed one last scare to teach them to stop messing with her.

She doubted they would. She poured herself a shot of whiskey and sipped it quietly in bed before falling into a much-needed, dreamless sleep. in the morning , she was woken by a howling spinning sound she’d never heard in this town. But she knew it well and she bristled when she placed it through the haze of sleep. The sound was the howl of a siren speeding past. She peeled back the curtain windows to see an ambulance disappearing down the road. Then she noticed some other things. The street was not the plague of stillness she’d known in her few months here, but a social hub bursting with activity. The residents had actually come out of their homes and were milling in and out of each other’s yards, speaking to one another. Some of them stood on their porches, their arms folded to their chests. One woman beat the dust out of an American flag on her porch banister and re-hung it. Only a catastrophe, Cindy thought. It wasn’t no damned national holiday and they weren’t barbequing, so it must have been some catastrophe that got them off their couches and out onto the streets.

She pulled her pants on and decided to go see what the fuss was about. A bad feeling crept up in her stomach. She couldn’t help worrying that she’d gone too far leaving those kids out there like that. But even if some harm had come to them, she thought, there was no way no one could pin that on her.

She stepped out onto her stoop and took a better look around.

The most troubling sight was what was happening in Travis’s drive.

Two police cars sat on the road by his house. Travis was talking to

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one of the four policemen that were walking around his yard. One of the policemen was picking up the cat cages from the bed of the truck and seemed to be inspecting them. It took a few minutes, but when Travis registered her presence, his face went all soft and scared looking. He nodded in her direction, then pointed at her and hung his head, as if ashamed. Right then Cindy noticed the most disturbing thing and it noticed her. In the back of one of the cop cars, she saw the tops of four little heads. One of the heads turned and looked out the back window. It was Rebecca’s face. Her eyebrow went up and the girl squealed, pushed open the car door and jumped out.

Rebecca began tugging on the cop’s arm, jumping up and down and shouting, “There she is! I told you she lived there. She’s right there! Go get her!” The cop took the girl by the shoulders and looked confused in Cindy’s direction. The three boys piled out of the car behind her. Their heads were hung and their faces were all red like they’d been crying. When she looked closer, she saw that they were still crying. Rebecca was crying too, squealing and having a fit. She pulled herself away from the cop, twisting herself around like a real pro, and tore over to Cindy, swinging her tiny fists in the air, her face red and streaming with tears.

“You killed her!” Rebecca screamed, “You killed her, you killed her!” Cindy tried to step back, but the girl was already up against her, pounding on her legs and stomach and reaching to claw her hair, screaming the whole time the horrible nonsense words that were echoing in Cindy’s skull, “You killed her, you killed her!”

The cop had followed along and grabbed the girl back from pounding Cindy. But the girl kept on having her fit as the cop held her twisting body. She shook her flushed face and screamed like a banshee then collapsed forward, still being held back in the cop’s arms, and sobbed.

“Why you have to kill my grandma?” she said, her words gurgling through her tears and snot. “Why you kill my grandma?”

Cindy shook her head no, confusion spreading across her face.

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“She’s allergic!” the girl squealed balling her fists and gnashing her teeth. “She’s allergic,” she hiccupped through her fit. “She was diabetic, she had amneeah and narcapsy, and asthma, and, and, and . . . She couldn’t do nothing to nobody. Why you kill her?”

The cop swung the girl over his shoulder and took her back across to Travis’s yard where her brothers stood with their heads hung, being comforted by some of the neighbors.

A good crowd had now gathered in Cindy’s yard. All those country folk were all just standing there staring at her, motionless, some with their arms folded, some shaking their heads, a horrible question written on all of their faces. Two policemen pushed their way through them and approached Cindy. One of them began, “We need to ask you some questions. It seems . . . well these kids are saying, that there’s been,” he struggled for words, “an ongoing . . . situation, involving . . . cats?”

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track four

This is a Man’s World

My name is Idrissa and I can pronounce hers effortlessly. She has stripped me of my identity. I do not recognize myself, by name or by face. The last time I looked at my face, it was a mess of black and blood and sweat. That was yesterday. I was resting, facedown in the bathroom sink of that horrible bar.

I was sure just where I was at then, and the mirror corroborated. I was, in fact, no longer there. That’s where I was at: gone. Un-presence is the purest moment of existence. She mangled my face. The I that I have known and created for myself to know was gone, perhaps frozen on a hill somewhere, or under a glass pane of ice pointing up from a lake. The body, here, there where I was, the face in the mirror reflected nothing of my history, my name, my caution, just the material facts, the horrible sweating back, legs, and arms limp and shaking in the struggle to remain upright, my left eye gashed above and gushing blood, swelling shut, my bottom lip in similar condition and the front down my trousers, soiled after my bladder, having taken a quick look around, decided also there was no more need to control itself in any civilized fashion.

I turned the handle on the faucet and splashed myself with the slightly rusted liquid the Mexican plumbing produced, dug around at something loose in my mouth and spit out a back tooth, which made a clinking sound as it hit the wall and bounced onto the filthy, pinkish floor.

I am far from that now. It is a steady cold I’m riding through. I am riding her ridiculous fantasy. I am her ridiculous fantasy riding. A black man riding Aryan over a blanket of snow so white it is almost blue, which is what has been said also of my blackness. There is a color we have in common. It must touch 346

in the middle where the spectrum begins to circle, which is also the color of a certain type of fire, continuous, ice hot, blue.

The hooves of the white horse pound beneath me, throwing up the top layer of snow that also beats against my face, stitching my wounds with frost. I do not fear the cold. I despise it. The cold, an anonymous face in the mirror, an unfamiliar body becoming me. I am beyond the point of hunger. I am beyond the point of chill. This is not a path that has been mapped out, the frozen fields that touch like a kiss between American towns, stretching, unnoticed, the empty fields that lie just beyond the little houses, factory lots, and suburban statehoods of this endless country. It is a barren, frozen road I have accepted as my path.

It is right that I should ride it, for I have always despised the cold with a hate that is so near fear. i despised the cold so I kept low. I kept to the South. It did not find me there, not often anyway. But when I met her, that was a day of anomaly. She brought it with her, I’m sure. When I met her, it was snowing as well. That was a day of anomaly. When I met her, it was snowing in New Orleans. a perpetual moth , I remember, was frozen to the banister outside. As I opened the door to the café, the icy black and white spotted wings of the insect seemed to me to represent the gothic resonance of that city. Even its insects wear the dress of vampires and circus people.

As did she. She brought it with her, the cold. It was as if the entire city froze solid at the sight of her, struck by the fact that any one person, especially an outsider, could so completely embody its nature. Like a stunned lover at first meeting, it turned stiff and surrendered the one element it possessed that might have wooed her into submission—the heat. At first sight of her, like a child in love with its mirror image companion, it defaced itself. And, as one would expect, she took no notice.

But I am speaking of this as though it were my reaction upon first seeing her. It was not at all. I found her repellant, and, as I

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have grown to know her well, I have found very little similarity in our natures.

The bar was full except for two stools on either side of her. I took one and ordered my tea and a biscuit. Frost had etched patterns into the café window. The gray stone of the walls and floors blended easily with the gray sky outside. Unaccustomed to the lack of light, the barista had made no attempt to compensate by increasing the internal lighting, so although it was just barely after noon, it seemed to be early evening.

A television hung above the counter. The muted captions reported the final sentencing of a young woman who had been accused of domestic terrorism many months before. I had been following the case since it began, as had, I suppose, many of the nation’s activists. I watched, waiting to see if direct action had taken the final death dip into the inconsolable coating of “terrorism.”

Apparently it had. The caption reported that early that morning, the girl was found guilty of terrorism for plotting to bomb the Monsanto plant in Saint Louis, Missouri. There was some lesser charge of assault, but that was not mentioned in the report. She was sentenced for terrorism only, sentenced to twenty years without possibility of parole. She had refused a plea deal to name her accomplice, who was still at large. It could have been worse. But it could have been better, too. They flashed footage of her being led from the courthouse, arms behind her back, hunched, her hair, a long, limp Mowhak hiding her face, as angry protesters shouted her down. Then the weather report came on.

Sheila, the barista, slanted her eyes at me as she poured the hot tea into my cup, then glanced sideways at the girl to my right and wiggled her nose, disapproving of something I had not yet noticed.

“You don’t take any milk, do ya, Drissi?” she asked, an aggressive tone to her voice, as if in asking this seemingly innocuous question she was simultaneously, in code, threatening something unseen. I shook my head no. Sheila gave an acquiescent nod and returned to her post at the end of the bar. Like the Venus of 348

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Andor she sat large, assertively taking up her space, her yellow skirt dangling between her spread knees, obviously ruffled, but easily falling back into boredom, scanning the paper while James Brown crooned from the speakers above the murmur of conversation. i would not have even noticed her, would not have even turned

my head to look at her if it hadn’t been for that wretched smell. At first I thought it must be a leak in a pipe. I could not, for those first few seconds, imagine that smell might be emanating from any sort of human being. It was a thick cloud of mildew that crept up my nostrils, some hybrid of mold, wet tobacco, and rotten tomatoes.

I glanced side to side, up and around, then followed my nostrils to the obvious source of the offence. Sniffing the whole time, and having now leaned into her personal sphere, I abruptly realized why the two seats on either side of her had remained empty, and what it was Sheila had been wiggling her nose about. Her eyes caught mine. I too, froze, gave a startled look and nodded politely, embarrassed at my own rudeness as I was now just a few inches away from her noxious head of hair, which crowned her like a black bird nest recently blown aloft by some violent storm. I sat back quickly and sipped at my tea. The smell grew stronger as she leaned over on her elbow, her face now just inches away from mine. “You need something, princess?” she asked, a playful malice showing in her tone. Sheila inquired with watchful eyes over the edge of her paper.

Perhaps, the first time she said it, she meant nothing by it. Perhaps it was something she would have called any man she was harassing. But the word cut me to the core. The muscles in my face went visibly to war with each other. I did not turn to look at her, for fear of giving something away that I could not afford to give.

“Are you speaking to me?” I asked, sipping at my tea again with a steadied hand.

She clicked her tongue loudly, a sound that would become, to me, a meter of intention. “I don’t see any other princesses in the Track Four: This is a Man’s World

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room, do you? You come pokin around here,” she motioned at an invisible line around herself with her finger, “so, whatcha want, princess?”

Two men looked up from the table near the window. I could feel their eyes scanning us. Did they see it on me now as well—the princess dress? In the first few moments I met her, she stretched my leathered facade thin like a piece of cellophane, looked easily through the transparency, and proclaimed the secret I had kept shielded in the shadow. I responded with a threatening roughness atypical of my character.

Replacing my cup of tea to the saucer, I dropped my chin to my chest. Folding my hands together, taking a dignified stance, I spoke lowly, sternly, “If you call me that once more, I am going to take this lovely cup of tea and smash it to bits on your stinking head, my darling.”

From the corner of my eye I watched her slow retreat as she sat back, upright on her stool, still facing me. The corners of her mouth began to turn up, then her entire face burst with a startling joy, and from that bursting, an echoing laugh boomed from her smiling mouth, three loud ha’s followed by a low cackle, a laugh often found emanating from cartoon villains. “All right,” she hollered, and gave me a hard pat on the shoulder. “Yer a sensitive Joe. Where’s that accent from, fella?”

She was referring to the thick, Western African accent I have never attempted to rid myself of, which is so often mistaken by Americans for Jamaican, French, or British. My accent though, to the knowledgeable ear, is easily placed. Her accent, on the other hand, even in the few short sentences she had spoken to me, already seemed to be touring the most incongruous regions and eras of North American culture. There were hints of the 1930s, late 1800s, as well as the current rural Southern accent, also dotted with the clean perfect American Vowels indicative of what is so often referred to as the television accent, which commonly stems from the Suburban Midwest and North. Her demeanor and dress 350

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might have been spawned from some rural American-gothic outback nightmare, or, just as easily, from some urban art enclave, or, again, from the demented closet of a suburban rebellion.

I assumed it was one of the later two or pure, simple insanity, and gave her no response as I chewed my biscuit. She went back to her sandwich, smacking her lips violently after each bite and gulped at her large glass of beer. She tuned her head up to the TV and asked Sheila if any more stations were running the news. Sheila barely shook her head no. She was making a point of ignoring this loud customer. I spread some butter on my biscuit.

Just when I thought she had forgotten about me, I felt an insistent tapping on my shoulder. I turned to look at her.

“Have you seen an albino horse around here lately?” she asked.

I stared blankly back at her. “It’s got red eyes, white hair. You probly woulda noticed. You seen it?”

There was a childish, searching manner to her questioning. Her tone, when she asked the question, reminded me of the boy from that old black and white television show about that do-gooding collie. She sounded like a pitiful child and looked like hell in combat boots. She wore knee-high striped socks over a torn pair of black tights. The socks did not match except that they were both striped. One was striped black and brown, the other, purple and red. Above the socks and torn tights, she wore what appeared to be a tattered black tutu, some collection of multi-colored T-shirts and a tight black sweater. Her eye makeup was painted thick and dark like a raccoon and her abundant lips sparkled with blood-red glittered rouge. She was currently the only person of Anglo descent in the café, but even for a white woman, she was awfully pale. But it feels strange here to refer to her as a woman, because she couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five and she seemed to have the emotional control of a four year old. I continued to stare at her, looking her up and down and back again.

“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Or has it been a while since you had your tongue stuck in a cat?”

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“Excuse me?” Was she now coming on to me?

She leaned in and spoke slowly, mockingly, as though I were deaf. “Have. You. Seen. An. Albino. Horse. Hmmm?”

I shook my head no. “No. I have not. Not recently. Not ever.”

She took another hulking bite of her sandwich and spoke through the mouthful, “Fuggin bull daggers.”

“What?”

“Fuggin bull dagger dykes!” She swallowed.

The words bounced around my head. Fuggin bull dagger dykes.

This, I thought, could become a popular phrase, not so unlike holy cow, or Mary, mother of God. I kept myself from showing my amusement. That would only entice her to continue. It would have been better to ignore her initially. She’d taken my threat as a token of fraternity, so like those boys on the playground who had to beat each other to bloody hell before they could become friends. She continued.

“Fuggin bull dagger stole my horse.” She leaned in and whispered low, “Cause I wouldn’t eat her rotten salami anymore.” She winked at me. “You get what I’m saying?”

Amusement visibly lighted my eyes. “I’m not sure I understand. You’re being so, subtle.” I was having a conversation with her. Against my better judgment, and, it seemed, against my will almost, I was jovially conversing with the smelly creature who had so insulted me a few moments earlier. And it was not an entirely unpleasant thing. There was an immediate intimacy to our exchange. But it was a thing that, the moment it began, I continuously tried to find a way out of, searchingly, with the back of my mind, while the rest of me kept on responding.

“I got reason to believe she’s being sold at an auction down around here.”

“Why’s that?”

She finished the last of her beer. “I’m sniffing her trail like you was sniffing my tail. I already been through Oklahoma and Arkansas. Horse keeps gettin sold. Such an oddity, people just wanna buy 352

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her to sell her again for a higher price. That’s what happens to us oddities, aint that right, [she paused] Mr. Kingy, sir?”

Again, she struck an intimate chord. The same that had been struck initially, but now we were together in it, lumped in that group labeled oddities, a marker so visible on me to her, I may as well have stunk to high heaven with the same wretched stench that kept the space around her unoccupied. I retreated then, licking the last bits of biscuit from my fingers and politely cleaning them on the napkin. I removed a few bills from my wallet, laid them on the counter and stood. “Well, good luck to you,” I said, nodding politely, tipping an invisible hat with my finger.

Her face scrunched up in disappointment and confusion.

“Hold on. Hold on there,” she pleaded. “I thought we was makin friends.” I gave her an uncomfortable grin. “Well, all right. You gotta go, you gotta go. It was nice meeting you anyway.” She stuck her hand out. I reluctantly extended my own. She grabbed it with the grip of an old sea captain, shook it twice, pulled me into her hard, gave me a rough pat on the shoulder, then squeezed my ass and released me. “That’s a nice one you got there, for the rest of you being so bony, that is,” she said, now tipping the invisible hat on her own head.

Sheila made a move to get up then thought better of it as the girl quickly reclaimed her seat and went back to finishing her sandwich. I somewhat stumbled out of the café in an un-sobered state of shock, feeling molested.

Unaccustomed to making my way even through the thinnest blankets of frost, I nearly slipped a few dozen times on my way to the office. The sun, though, was giving sign of poking through the gray clouds, and there was hope that the anomalous blanket of winter would be melted away by the next morning. joy is a thing , I think, separate from grace. Grace, they sing it

amazing, they sing it sweet, they name it a sweet sound. But it is not a sound. It is a silence, and silence is escape, and there is grace in Track Four: This is a Man’s World

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escape. How dutifully I had plotted my grace, learned myself my silence, the silence of a prisoner slipping open the barred doors in the ink of night. How well oiled the hinges, so that the door falls open without even the slightest creak or shutter. How stealthy my motions. I saunter through the gates with an easy nod at the guards, with all the confidence of any warden. They let me pass unknowing. Each day I pass through the gates with all the silent confidence of a keeper, with an easy nod at those who hold the keys. They do not see the damaged wire in my pocket where I jimmied the hole. They do not recognize the suit is not my own, tailored slightly larger than my frame. They never check the empty cell, they have such confidence in their bondages. Us oddities, we learn how to slip. We learn to shimmy and shine and scuttle and scurry, we learn to dip and dodge, and there is grace there, there must be. Escape requires grace. But there is no joy in the grace. There is only the duty of survival, a fear shaking each step like a wretched incurable cough welling up that must be contained each moment. No, joy is not there unless one is fervent, unless one makes joy their purpose, unless one possesses the caliber of bravery that transcends the duty of survival and finds an obligation not only to survive, but to live.

Grace is not joyful. And there is no soothing hand reaching down from heaven and patting us on our freakish heads, no. Amazing.

Grace is not religiously belted. Grace is a whispered lie. Grace is the freak seductively dancing. Grace is the silent song played by the skilled hands of the secret prisoners as they reach out and take that which will never be rightly theirs, but which they must have.

It was, I believe, a full two hours past our brief meeting before I realized my wallet was gone. Where had it been? My coat pocket?

My jacket pocket? My trousers? I couldn’t remember. After only a brief time in the office, I left work and walked to the bank in order to apply for a new card and was planning on stopping by the DMV to register for a new ID after that. But upon reaching the bank, I found it to be closed. The unseasonable cold, for many in this city, is cause for holiday. Not everyone dared brave the near inch 354

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of snow and frost that had covered the ground in the morning. I headed instead to the police station. A couple passed on the walk beside me, absurdly bundled, a bottle of whiskey in the woman’s hand, both of them laughing and singing in an absolute failure of harmony.

The police officer I spoke with was a rather abrupt, large white man in his mid-fifties who didn’t seem to be enjoying his desk job, whatsoever. I told him I had been robbed. He set his incomprehensible eyes on me. “You hurt?” he asked, almost as an accusation of something.

“No. It was a pickpocketing,” I told him. “She did the bump moves and everything. It’s amazing how it can happen so quickly.”

He grunted and turned back to his computer. His hands fumbled below his desk, producing a form which he slid over to me, grunting again as he did so. I took the second grunt to mean that I should fill it out.

I took a seat and checked the boxes, first identifying myself as the victim. I was a black—check; man—hmmmm, check; in his thirties—check. The culprit was a white—check; woman—check; presumably in her twenties—check. Under identifying features I scrawled, “black hair, striped socks, tutu.”

I filled out the rest of the form, returned to the desk and sat it down in front of the officer. After several minutes of silence, then a good full minute of him clearing his nose through a series of snarls and finally into a soiled napkin, he picked it up and read it over.

“What’s this say?” he asked, placing a meaty finger on the dotted lines, “tut tut?”

“Tu tu,” I said, enunciating the word so that it came out more flamboyantly than I would have liked, especially so when paired with my accent.

His eyebrow curved up like a worm. “You saying a girl in a tutu stole your wallet?”

“It was a black tutu. Maybe I should add that,” I said, reaching for the form. He held it firmly, a look of disapproval spreading Track Four: This is a Man’s World

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across his face. He looked me up and down. I am a rather tall, slim, but muscular person. I was dressed neatly that day, in a brown overcoat, a collared shirt and corduroys, my hair cut close. He repeated his question in monotone, “A girl in a tutu stole your wallet?”

“She was very sneaky,” I told him defensively. But that wasn’t true at all. She hadn’t been sneaky. She was gruff and coarse and quite tough actually, but I couldn’t tell him she was quite tough as he was already very disappointed in my masculine abilities.

“And the contents was eighty dollars, an ID, and a credit card?

That right?”

“Yes, and I need to cancel the card as soon as possible. I haven’t been able to do it because the bank is closed . . .” He was already turning away from me and placing my form in a filing shelf.

“It’s emergency weather today,” he said calmly. “It’ll be open tomorrow.”

He returned to his desk and began typing on the keypad. “Is that all you do?” I asked. “I mean,” I immediately checked myself, “is that all I need to do here?” Without looking up, he nodded, his face beginning to show annoyance. I turned and exited that fine institution of public service, penniless and without identification. i returned to the office . My coworkers sat at their desks, hunched over their computers. There were five of us in the small room that appeared at first glance to be held together with duct tape. Duct tape patched the carpet where it had split, and the couch arm, also where it had split. Everything was split and patched with silver tape. Also applied with duct tape were the political posters that adorned the off-white walls. Dan stood and handed me a note.

“That congressman called while you were gone,” he told me. “He sounds excited about something.” Dan was a broadly built and very tall man in his late fifties, who had transplanted himself from a Native American reservation in Michigan to New Orleans some fifteen years before.

“Do you think we have his vote, Idrissa?” Jeanette popped

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happily, smiling from the corner of the room where she sat. She and her counterpart Lisa, who sat at the desk beside her, made the perfect Betty and Veronica pair, both bright-eyed and optimistic, having each just recently graduated from their respective universities.

“I can’t say yet,” I told her flipping through my sheets, placing a finger firmly in my ear as Kevin shouted into his phone.

“I want this done now! Fucking now!” he exclaimed, pounding his fist on his desk. Kevin was always shouting something like, “I want this done now!” or, “Get him on the line!” or “We’re dead without this!” into his phone, generally prefaced by his choice expletive. He slammed the phone into the receiver and I partially expected to hear a bell ring.

“Drissa, Goddamnit!” he said, leaning his chair against the wall.

“What’s the deal?”

“That’s just it,” he said, kicking the bottom of the desk with his foot. “That congressman who called you, he’s going to ask for a deal. But you can’t believe what he wants us to trade. Won’t fucking believe it.”

I waited. “What is it?” Jeanette asked, moving to the edge of her seat.

“He implied that he’ll vote for halting the condo construction if we back the fucking voucher school.”

Jeanette stood, her cheeks reddening, “But that was almost our entire campaign platform last year, no voucher schools. People see our logo and the first thing they think of is our slogan, ‘Voucher schools ration education, and the mind is not made of bread alone.’”

I winced slightly, “Who came up with that, again?”

“Drissa, we can’t do it. There’s no way,” Kevin said.

He was absolutely right. “I don’t understand why he expects so large a trade,” I said, sighing and slipping dejectedly into my seat. “His vote isn’t worth it. Even with him, we are still two votes short.” At my job, even a win meant absolutely nothing the majority of the time.

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Kevin pulled a notepad out of one of his many mysterious pockets. I hadn’t realized, before meeting Kevin, the full array of products produced by the Carharts company. Before meeting Kevin, I had thought of them strictly as pants manufacturers, but I now know they make not only pants, but jackets, shirts, bags, hats, and even bandanas, all ripe with a vast array of mysterious pockets. I don’t think Kevin owned anything that did not bear the Carharts label, except, perhaps, for a few “clever” T-shirts, which I guess people were supposed to find shocking. Today his shirt bore a picture of a buffalo, the word “FAIL” etched in capital letters below it. Was that somehow for Dan’s benefit? I wondered.

The first few weeks of his employ, he had kept his shirts along the lines of “Capitalism Kills,” and “Food Not Bombs,” which is just the kind of thing one expects to find in a political nonprofit.

Somewhere in the middle of the first month though, he upped the game, and came in wearing a shirt that bore the phrase, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Jeanette and Lisa gave him much praise and increased affection over that and he wore it three days in a row, till it began to smell. I personally grimaced when I saw it. We’re screwed, I thought, if this is now what a feminist looks like—a scruffy late twenties white man who either shouted or whispered everything he said (and his speeches were abundant) and shook when he did so as if being seized by some violent fury of righteousness, or else cowered down as if overcome with the weighty humility of his state, ridden with guilt, no doubt of being a handsome fellow of a fortuitous age with generous potential. A week later he took the game to an even greater level and came in wearing a shirt that read, “I had an abortion.” What’s next? I wondered, “Black and proud”? But no, that wasn’t next. That was three months later.

Kevin scribbled something down on his pad with manic intensity. “You give him a call. In the meantime, I can get eighty people who can show up to demonstrate in front of the construction site tomorrow.”

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“I can get about thirty-five more,” Dan added. “We have to keep going hard on this, but that deal’s whacky. You gonna talk to him, Idrissa?”

I nodded and scooted up to my desk, pulling out the congressman’s number. Everything in me was shaking, and the word princess echoed through me. I fidgeted with the phone, but my mind wasn’t in the right place, and it took me more than an hour to get it back. There was something else in the wallet, something that no bank could cancel and no government official could replace.

A small tattered photo, a mother and child standing beside a tree, bathed in sunlight that bursts behind them, a golden star exploded by the camera’s lens. The child and mother wear identical dresses made from the same yellow fabric. The mother holds her hands on the child’s shoulders, leaning forward in anticipation, both of them smiling brilliantly, the brown flower patterned yellow skirts of their dresses flung to the side by the wind, as if in curtsey.

She had no doubt found it already or soon would. Perhaps she would crumple it and toss it aside, or perhaps she would take it out for inspection, look closely at the faces. And then she would see.

And no one had seen, not for many, many years. night had come and the frost was fast melting away. I walked

down the cobbled streets of the Garden District, taking gulping mouthfuls of the crisp air and enjoying the clear starry sky that comes after such a chill. The neighborhood now appeared completely untouched, which made it difficult for me to believe in the devastation that rested just a few miles away. They finally found a way to clean up New Orleans. Isn’t that what someone had said?

They thought they had a clean slate to build on, but many of them quickly found what all of us who have lived here any amount of time already knew to be true, that even ten thousand leagues below the sea, New Orleans would still be filthy as a gutter dog’s rag.

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with them, no, for them. Or maybe it wasn’t even their battle I was fighting at all. I have always lived a quite comfortable, middleclass existence. I have never known poverty. I have known loss. I have had things to lose and I have lost many of them, but I have never known what it is to be the dust flown out by sweeping waves, have never known what it is to have nothing to lose, so that every atrocity compounds upon another and becomes your equity, and becomes your capital. i clopped up the small walk to my building and set the key to turn in the lock. A faint odor filled my nose and I twitched as her voice came cutting at my back, “No chance you aint still seen no albino horse yet have you?” I pulled the key from the lock and turned, placing my back against the door in a defensive stance.

There she was, her hand on her hip, two large bags shaped like globes sitting at her side. She tilted her head at me and nonchalantly removed something from her teeth with her tongue, her face twisting, making loud sucking sounds as she did so. I stared at her silently. “No? That mean no? I guessed you wouldn’t have. Yeah, you probably don’t hang out places she might be.”

I nodded slowly, finding myself petrified, confounded. “How did you find my address?”

“Oah!” she shouted, her weird accent affecting even the onomatopeias, “It was on yer ID.” She then produced my wallet somehow from her bosom region and held it out to me. “You left it at the restaurant. Thought I’d bring it back to you.”

I took it with a small amount of trepidation and inspected the pocket. “My money is missing.”

“Yeah well,” she said, cocking her head to the side, “folks now days, they can’t be trusted. Someone at the restaurant musta took it.” She then looked me dead in the eye and winked with the air of a cowboy daring me to pick up the gun. I did not pick up the gun. I wanted to keep my farm. My cards seemed to be in place.

I thanked her and placed my wallet at the bottom of my satchel.

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“Well then, all right, good night,” I told her, shifting my weight self-consciously, hoping she would leave. She nodded at me, her head bouncing as if keeping time to a nonexistent rock song. Then she did something strange with the inside of her mouth and spit a large gob of saliva to the curb.

“So, uh, you aint takin me for a drink or nothing for finding your wallet and all?”

And, again, I found myself staring silently at her. I believe my jaw may have actually begun hanging open. I swallowed hard.

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

She smacked me on the shoulder. “No reason to apologize, hunn. Yer probably just tired and wudn’t thinkin.”

There was a massive disconnect between her beauty, and the rest of her: her smell, her accent, manner and speech. Her face was the pinched perfection of a porcelain doll, and her makeup that of a circus harlot. Her eyes sparkled in the streetlight, a brilliant green, the childish beauty of a nymph residing in them. She was only a few inches above five feet tall with a relatively small frame, but, I noted, possibly muscular upper arms and a more than adequate bust. She was treating me with the confidence and entitlement of that typically possessed by a well armed Mafioso ordering his debtor, or perhaps, his mistress. “I suppose you’re right,” I told her, hoping to placate her. “I wasn’t thinking. But you see, I am very tired tonight, so maybe some other time I can offer you that drink.”

She began nodding to the nonexistent rock song again. “Mmm hmm. Mmm hmmm,” she said. “Hey, Idrissa, that sure is a pretty picture in there.”

I coughed profusely, but quickly quieted it. I looked up, directly into the streetlight and let it blind me for a moment as anger began to course through me. She wasn’t the only one who could be tough.

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circles. But I could find it when I needed it. I balled my fists and stepped forward, squaring my frame. I looked down at her with threat in my eyes. She did not budge, but tilted her head up at me, an exaggerated expression of question on her face. She would not be intimidated by anything less than a full assault, and no, this wasn’t right, I absolutely towered over her. What power did she have anyway, an insane, homeless rag-doll poking around to get an extra drink from her morning steal? It was an awkward moment of stepping up then stepping back.

I stepped back and found my key. “Yes, thank you,” I told her, “for returning that to me. That is one of the few remaining pictures of my sister and mother. So, you see, I am actually very grateful.”

Her eyes danced as an almost maternal expression bloomed on her face, pointed with a slightly menacing, or was it seductive, smile? Her voice was soft and cool now. “Naw, that aint yer sister.”

Her smile became kind, pitying as she stepped slowly toward me, till again I found myself with my back up against my door. “Why you telling lies, ole coondog? That aint no sister. That’s you, Drissi.

That there’s you, hunn.”

She leaned into me placing her body fully against mine and caressed the lining of my overcoat. The smell was overwhelming. I attempted to hold my breath so that after a few seconds I appeared to be gasping, and before I knew it, I was gasping. “Now don’t keep on lyin. There’s no need. I seen you there in that photo like I seen you there at that counter like I’m seeing you right now. Aint nothing you gonna be hiding. I already seen it. I seen it all. I’m seeing it right now, aint I?” She was whispering in a cracking voice, which was actually quite lovely, and looking at my body as she ran her fingers up and down the center of my chest, before raising her eyes to me and giving me the most clear, certain look a woman has ever given me. “Now why don’t you invite me up for a drink and a shower, cause I got no place to be tonight and I’m guessing you aint as tired as you say.”

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into it. “Why?” I came back harshly, “so that you can rob me blind?”

She laughed softly and tilted her head, the way kittens do.

“Well, that’s right I guess, you got reason to say things like that. I can’t promise I aint gonna rob you cause you wouldn’t believe me if I said so, but I can promise,” her hand found its way to the front of my pants and she began scratching, softly caressing with the tips of her fingers. “I can promise you’ll be blind by morning.” Then her palm was against the part of me that had started bulging and she was squeezing and her fingers were going under, in between my legs, pressing in a slow circle, and then I melted and the building melted with me, as did the sky, I believe, and I looked into the lamplight and let it take my eyes. we made our way silently through the hall, each step, for me,

a progressive mark of reckoning. I couldn’t shake the thought that I was heading toward some horrible mistake from which I would never recover. But at the same time, with each step there came a tremendous feeling of increasing lightness. I did not realize how lonely I had been until we were making our way down the hall toward my apartment. It was, I suppose, that I had not allowed myself to feel that emotion until it was leaving me. I had not realized the weight I was carrying until it was being lifted, and I then understood the full burden of the weight through its lifting.

I turned the key, pushed open the door, and switched on the light. She stepped past me and dropped her bags, immediately appearing as comfortable in my space as she might have in her own home. “You gonna make drinks?” she asked, quickly removing her outer layers. “I’ll jump in the shower. You make drinks.”

I went and got her a towel as she undressed in my living room.

I laid the folded towel neatly on the side of the bath then scurried into the kitchen, avoiding her. “You sure are a tidy one,” she hollered at me from the other room.

“What do you drink?” I shouted back, my voice tense and cracking.

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I heard her chuckling and shuffling about. “Whatever you got.”

“Well, I have wine, beer, and scotch and cola.” This was ridiculous. What was I doing? My hands fumbled with the glasses.

“You don’t ever gotta ask me that again, then,” she shouted with the strange manner of an old grizzled man conducting her words.

“If it a choice tween scotch and rotten grape juice, I’m going for the good brown stuff. That’ll do it every time, just fine by me.”

Then I heard the rush of water and the bathroom door closing. she reemerged thirty minutes later from a cloud of steam,

a towel wrapped around her head like a turban, wearing a more sensible black skirt and a thin, tattered shirt that gave her bra-less bosom a soft, feminine power the way it hung around her breasts, hinting with the outline at an amplitude unseen, its thinness revealing more than a trace of her apparently erect nipples.

I had already finished my first drink and was beginning my second. I shifted uncomfortably on the couch as she sat down next to me and unwrapped the towel from her head. “That mine?” I nodded and handed her glass to her. She laid the wet towel on the arm of my couch. I stood, took the towel and placed it in the hamper.

She gave me a look of disgust as I returned to the couch beside her.

“You sure are a tidy one,” she said again, chuckling, and quickly sucking down the top half of her drink. “Hey though, thanks for the shower.” She clinked my glass against hers and downed the rest. “Can I have one more?”

She took to the second drink more slowly. As she stared at me in silence, sipping at it, her legs curled up and reclining comfortably at the arm of my beige couch, I began to question the nature of our little visit. Was she, perhaps, a prostitute? Was she expecting me to offer her pay? This was not something I was completely beyond, no doubt, I had paid my penance for affection, but never in my own home, never even in my own city.

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she scrunched up her nose and shook her head no. “I’m sorry?” I asked.

“Why you keep apologizin? You aint done nothin wrong.” She stood, drink in hand, and began grazing around my living room, picking up my little things and placing them back down. She stopped at a small wooden statue, a man with an elongated body and neck in crouching position. “What’s this?” she asked holding it up and turning it over.

“That is an African carving of . . .”

“That where you from?” she asked, interrupting me. “You from Africa, but not, I mean, like those others are from Africa, but really from Africa?”

I stood and took the carving from her, replacing it to the table.

“Yes.” “Whereabouts?”

“Western Africa.”

Her face showed no sign of recognition. “That different than the rest? Honestly, I thought you was from Finland.”

“Why would you have thought that?”

“I saw a movie once, they talked like you.”

I nodded, beginning to feel the absurdity of my choice to let her in. “No. I was raised in Senegal.”

“That in Africa?”

“What are they teaching in these American schools?” I asked, attempting to make a joke, but her face quickly showed with horrible embarrassment and she looked down at her feet as her toes touched each other.

Then, as quickly as it had left, her confidence came back aggressively. She cocked her head and looked me threateningly in the eye. “Well I guess I don’t know nothing about that,” she said, an angry tone to her voice. “Church aint the only place to find God and schools aint the only place to learn. Now I didn’t get that opportunity like some better-off folks, and I aint ashamed to say so. I gotta take it from where I can. I was just askin you a Track Four: This is a Man’s World

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goddamned question. You can answer it or not, but that’s no reason to be chastisin.”

I stepped back and sighed deeply. I could now eliminate suburban rebellion from my list of possibilities of her spawning. “Right,” I tried to begin again. “Senegal is a country . . . in Western Africa.”

“And that’s where you was born?” she asked, returning to the couch.

“No. I was born in Mali.” She stared at me blankly. “That’s also in the west of Africa.” I explained carefully, “It’s a country. I was born in a city called Timbuktu. How about you? Where were you born?” I was dying to know. But she gave no sign of response.

Actually, I noted, a strange look had come over her, a look of awe.

Her eyes were widening and her lips had parted. She sat the drink down on the table and leaned forward.

“No, you was not,” she said as a sort of question.

“I’m sorry?”

“You was not born there.”

“Oh, yes. Yes. I was definitely born there.”

She stood from the couch and made her way over to me, her cheeks beginning to burn red and her eyes watery. She took hold of the collar of my shirt and pressed herself against me, tilting her head upward. “You was not born in Ten Buck Two.” I thought better of correcting her pronunciation and simply nodded in affirmation. “Yes, I can assure you I was. I can produce the necessary documents if need be.” I said, now smiling.

The smile was quickly sucked from my lips, torn from my face by the incautious bite of her teeth. She held the back of my head tightly with her hands, like claws pulling me down to her.

I struggled against her, shocked, feeling the weight of her body simultaneously pressing against mine and pulling me down. Her hands pawed with a furious tenderness at my head and her little bites found their way to my neck, my ears, then below the collar of my shirt in a space that was neither or both my shoulder and chest she began sucking, clawing at my back, and I fell to the floor on top 366

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of her, a brilliant electricity shooting through me. She was, I dare say, growling and purring as she wiggled beneath me.

There we were and there was only a writhing and clawing, where I found myself lunging at the space between her legs, feeling a desperation that lighted that moment with a freedom, an unburdening, that relighted all the other moments of my life with a more desperate burden of control, as well as of anticipation of this moment. She stopped writhing, took my hips in her hands and pushed, flipping me onto my back, and mounted me eagerly.

On my living room floor, I thought. Ha! Right here on the living room floor. She began undressing me there as she sat crouched over me like an animal tearing into a kill. She took at it so rapidly I did not have time to think to stop her, to warn her even. This was the first time, in adulthood, a woman I had not been paying was seeing me completely naked. But I allowed it, I suppose, because she was not quite a woman, undressing me. I was being uncovered by an insane child, an animalistic purring, growling thing.

I lay motionless as a gutted antelope, my eyes begging and proud, finding an infantile and joyous acceptance, eternally wounded in that final moment of uncloaking, that perfect watery look the prey gets as the big cat gnaws on their innards, as they begin to cease breathing, acquiescing to the feeling of themselves being eaten away. She unbuttoned my shirt and pulled my undershirt, as well as the smashing contraption I wear, over my head. I shivered in anticipation of her response to my small, nearly prepubescent breasts, but she simply bowed down and took a few little nips at them as she began unbuttoning my pants. There was a kicking off of shoes and a tugging down, then she took off her own shirt, and I felt myself swelling more at the sight of her breasts, her absurdly pink nipples, and stomach which nearly shone of its own light, of her pale whiteness, tightening and releasing to her gasping.

I closed my eyes and felt another tugging. Then I lay for a moment, stiff, naked, splayed on my living room floor, something in me completely devastated, a little bird fluttering around with Track Four: This is a Man’s World

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a torn wing, broken beak. Feeling a warm wetness beginning to take me, I opened my eyes. She had burrowed her head down.

Unflinching, she first took it in her mouth and sucked at it like a hungry babe on a bottle. It grew then to the point where there was no more growing to be done and she left it there standing like a monument to the generosity of women. She found her way further down below it, pushed two small balls of flesh aside with her finger and flicked her tongue, tickling there where only God knows what had grown itself a place of devastation on me, but this same place is a source of my pleasure, and then she found the other known part of my horrible four and slipped her fingers inside. She sat up and gave me a pointed look, her face wet with me, her hand moving in me. Feeling someone inside me was like looking directly into the face of God and telling a lie, and getting away with it.

She must have seen the look of desolation on my face, so she smiled, and in a mean, nearly mocking voice said, “Looks like you got it all, baby.”

Something about her statement and tone settled me. I sat up and took her in my hands. With the same unspeakable acceptance she had taken me in her mouth, I took her body in my hands, pulled her toward me and kissed her glistening lips so joyously it could have been a song.

It went on for hours, as she seemed determined to satisfy every point on me and in each point she took her satisfaction insatiably, making noises, sometimes like an animal, growling like a big cat, a wild look in her eyes that frightened me in moments, and I thought she might grow fur.

Afterward, she lay on her back, her arms up, covering her face. That was the only night she was ever silent, but then she was completely silent as I lay, collapsed, my head on her stomach, weeping . . . what I thought might be an endless weeping.

I let my tears collect a pool on her belly. I wiped my snot on her breasts. She did not balk, but kept still, her face expressionless as I made her body a tubule for my lamentation, a wet rag for my sobbing.

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I am not one for crying after lovemaking, but that night the vase broke open in me and spilled out. I cried against her as if pounding a coffin, and gave no thought to stopping, but let the crying swallow me up and take me through its bowels.

It was not my choice to hide. I had always told myself it was, but in those few hours, in that exercise of desire and acceptance, without even meaning to, she, an insane stranger, had shown me it was not my choice. I remembered, there inside my crying, the girl I had been and the boy hiding there in her under the cover of skirts, the boy I had never been allowed, the boy my mother tucked under the pillows. Had my mother stepped into the street a few moments earlier, before the swerving and the crash of twisted metal, that girl might have grown into a woman. That would not have been the truth. But neither was the man I had become. The man I was made into. Neither are the truth. I do not exist on one or another side of some absurd dyadic scale. I am both or neither.

There is no choice to be made. And yet it seems impossible not to make except under cover of a circus tent.

Somehow, finally, my tears subsided and she had, by then, fallen to sleep. I took her in my arms and led her to the bed then curled next to her tenderly, letting a much needed slumber also take me in its jaws.

I woke early in the morning. She was still sleeping. The sunlight played with her face, making her look very much like a small child.

I took her shoulder and shook her gently to wake her. She did not wake, but growled and hissed, swinging her hands like claws so violently in the air I jumped back to avoid being maimed. I had to be at the demonstration, and wanted her to wake and leave when I left, but there was no waking her. The thought came to me hard then, as she was growling and clawing through her blanket of sleep, that I had no idea what variety of creature I’d invited into my home.

I had no choice but to leave her alone in my apartment, although I feared my own possessions, and perhaps even the entire building, might not be found in any distinguishable order when I returned.

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as i entered the office that morning, I remember things had begun to take on an asinine light. It was difficult for me to look at the signs that hung over my desk, which I normally took little notice of, without grimacing, “Bring back ‘We the People’!”— “America, Pay More Attention!”—“Care not Cash!”—and, of course, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! (The people, united, will never be defeated!)”

Why were they all so horribly exclaimed!?! Why were the walls of my office screaming at me, pleas for an absolution that would, no doubt, never arrive? When were “we the people” ever here?

And if we were, where did we go? Who took us? Did we want to be brought back? Would we come willingly? And as for America, what was it that it might be called out as a conscious entity that should, as if being awoken from scribbling secret love letters in class, pay more attention?

The people, united, as far as I can remember, have typically accomplished the most grueling and horrific defeats, not only of those few wondrously un-united dissenters, those traveling through the slip strings of the frayed edges of unity, but also the absolute and continuous defeat of themselves. The people, when they do choose so miraculously to unite into a majority, typically do so by weaving themselves with the most coarse and common caliber of thread and pattern. The common thread is not generally an interesting one. In order to extend its reach through the pores of and bond to the majority flesh, it must shine with that luminescent idea of some absolute human nature, which, to catch quickly, must be a base, easy to grasp, tactile thing. And once it has woven itself tightly, that thick fabric becomes so like a snake eating its tail in the contradiction of the obvious fact that the idea of some absolute human nature has excluded a precious few, who do not share that so-called thread of absolute human nature and so must be considered something other than . . . and so it begins to twist, catching all those who have not been woven into its dense fabric in a slipknot of itself. And the fabric itself also defeats itself, becoming not the

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saving chord that binds one to another to another in that treacherous climb up the cliff, but the worn, murderous rope hanging from the haunted tree.

It is not only in times of revolution and oppression, but throughout the course of each day, each casual moment, continuously, on so many levels of existence, the knot is tied and undone, and done again. I know. We oddities have learned how to scurry and jimmy and scramble and slip, and slip through without harm, all until that final moment of catching. But in our hearts we know, oh do not think we do not know, there will be that final moment, that final moment will come, that dark day when we are slumbering late, or looking the wrong direction, that day we forgot to grease the latches, their palms, our necks. more than one hundred faces shone in the morning light,

most of them black. How did they keep looking up? Maybe up was the only direction they had the option of looking. Dan gave me a hand-scrawled schedule of the day’s speakers. “I thought you would have made it in earlier for the briefing,” he told me.

“Yes. Me too. Something came up this morning.”

“With the senator?”

“No, a personal matter.”

Dan’s eyes gleamed with curiosity. I realized that this was the first time during my employ I had communicated having such things as “personal matters.” I had always been, how should I say . . . devoted, fiercely driven. Since graduating, I had gone from one political nonprofit to another, founding two organizations in the process. If one organization closed down, I simply moved on to the next. It was not uncommon for me to put in at least three fourteen-hour days over the course of one week. I had no personal matters. The political was personal for me and the personal was my job.

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which we were here to protest the contruction of. She reached out, feeling for the microphone. An assistant directed her grasping. A short, thinning woman in her early seventies, the Reverend had gone blind nearly ten years before. Although she had never been an official minister, her life of sermonizing granted her the title Reverend among all who knew her. Although now completely blind, she continued to parent her fifteen-year-old adopted niece who suffered from autism. The girl stood at the side of the crowd. A friend of the Reverend’s held tight to the belt of her oversized jeans, as the girl was known to try to make a run for it at every chance she got.

It was not uncommon to see some hapless volunteer darting after her across a meadow or, unfortunately once, a highway, during the course of these rallies. Oddly enough, the only person who seemed to be proficient at her keeping was the small, blind Reverend. The power of her will never ceased to inspire awe in me, and I’m positive the crowd saw her character as proof of the credos she intoned, faith having the ability to move mountains and such.

Her niece was in a pleasant mood today. Although she pulled invariably forward, away from her holder, she squealed, smiling, and clapped her hands above her head as her aunt began speaking.

“This building behind me used to house one hundred and twenty people. One hundred and twenty people. More than twenty families lived in this building. This was their home. This wasn’t anyone else’s home. This was their home!” She pressed her finger to the podium and the crowd unanimously agreed, “That’s right.” “When the hurricane hit,” she continued, “we lost a lot.” She bowed her shaking head, “Lord knows we lost a lot.” The crowd agreed once more.

Dan stood next to me, nodding silently. I leaned and whispered into his ear, “We got more than we expected.” I hadn’t guessed more than eighty people would show, but there were well over one hundred in attendance. The lawn was awash in red shirts.

“Some of us lost our homes. Some of us lost our jobs,” the Reverend went on. “We lost our roads, our parks.” She held a hand in the air. “Some of us lost our kin.” The crowd rejoined with a solemn, 372

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“Amen.” “The flood took many things. But,” she paused dramatically and pointed to the structure behind her, “it didn’t take this. The hurricane didn’t take this. This place where this building is being built, there was another building there, a housing project that was not damaged by the hurricane. It was a home for so many, and it was fine.”

The people began to seethe. There was an energy present this day that I thought we had lost over the course of the year. I shifted excitedly, watching them. The question is always one of harnessing momentum the moment it begins. What would these people be willing to do, and for how long would they be willing to do it?

“Our government came and looked around, and saw everything wasted, smashed, soaked. They saw devastation and they looked at this building, and the other projects that were not devastated, that were still standing, that hadn’t been touched, and they decided to tear this down. They decided to make more destruction. Instead of preserving what was there and building the rest back up, they decided to keep tearing it down. They decided to tear us down.

Instead of letting the poorest people back into their homes, they decided to finish what the storm didn’t. They decided to sweep us out. But are we going to let them?” She was shouting. “Are we going to let them clean out the poor of our city?”

“No!” The crowd hollered back, many raising fists in the air.

“Hell no!” bounced around the crowd.

“Heck no,” the Reverend replied, smirking. The crowd laughed.

“Mixed income housing is a lie.” Her voice, although cracking with age and shaking high, held the weight of her convictions and moved one to emotion maybe more than that of a booming young man would have. She spoke more calmly into the microphone. “Only two percent of the people who lived in the other projects before the hurricane came back to the other projects they turned into so-called mixed income housing. The rest are homeless, in shelters, or have left the state. We want our people back! We want our homes back!

We want our city back! I know some of you are here today, some of you who have been waiting too long to go back home.”

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I scanned the crowd, making mental note of familiar faces, those who had given a consistent dedication to this cause. All thoughts of the night before and the strange morning with that odd girl had left me. What would be our next move, I wondered. More demonstrations, build up the numbers to get media coverage of the issue?

And then what? I doubted it would change anything. Here I was worried that they would be too tired, that the community would lose its small bit of momentum, and yet when I looked out to them, they were bursting. When I looked into myself, I found only what seemed to be a final plateau.

I looked to Kevin, who stood across from me, clapping and smiling. He gave me a thumbs up. “Wow, she’s awesome,” he mouthed to me, nodding vehemently. He was still very young, and optimistically white, and I could tell he had not yet begun to wonder if these efforts of advocacy were completely in vain.

“Anything can happen behind an outhouse in the dark of the night.” The Reverenced spoke ominously. “We are here today to shine a light on their dirty deeds. We are here to let them know we can see what they’re doing.”

I found myself nodding. In my moments of question I, like a backslider grasping at gospel, invoked a Ralph Ellison quote: “Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” But this time, it didn’t help. Certain defeat was wearing on me. One needs to win something certainly sometimes.

“Let us pray.” Everyone bowed their heads, except Dan. This was a point of disagreement between us. I tried to distract myself with our ongoing argument from thoughts of the state of my “personal affairs.” Dan saw us as working with the members. I saw us as working for the members. What might she steal? Perhaps that statue? I hoped she wouldn’t go for the electronics. I found it disrespectful not to go along with their prayer. Dan saw my actions as disrespectful. He’d even gone so far as to use the word patronizing, pretending to be praying to a God in which I did not believe. No, she would most likely 374

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just leave. Everything would be fine. I would never hear from her again. When I returned home, it would be as if these strange two days had never happened.

Dan claimed that by not pretending to be praying along, he was respecting their religion more than I was. But he could play the part of the stubborn Indian without being questioned. I could not.

It would become only a moment of stepping into the fire and walking through, like a revealing dream remembered as gazing into a fogged mirror. Amen.

I raised my heretical head. The sun glared in my eyes over the seas of faces turned up toward the Reverend. A group of six more people, also in the emblematic red shirts, made their way across the grass to join us. I scanned the faces thoughtlessly, then froze, as I found one pair within that mass of eyes all looking up, looking back at me, twinkling blue-green in the glare. Those light eyes bore a hole through me. There she was, her head tilted, her pink mouth cracked in a curious smirk. That ridiculous pale white girl grinning below a tangled mop of black hair back in her black tutu, striped socks and combat boots. The fog lifting from the mirror, the absurd dream waking and following me out into the day, holding within its knowledge my ruinous secrets of night. Once again, I felt the sharp sting of the prey caught in the gaze of the predatory creature. Was she, I wondered, laughing at me?

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track five

A Little Less Conversation

“ i came to america when I was fourteen, two years after my mother’s death. She was a nurse. We traveled and lived many different places throughout my childhood. She was a very private woman, but I think that privacy was unnatural for her. She became private because of me, because of . . . how I am. Maybe she’d also become a bit introverted due to the shame she felt about what transpired between herself and my father when I was born.”

“What happened to your daddy?”

“I don’t know. I can only imagine. He disappeared two days after I was born. He blamed himself.”

“Why?” “From what I know of him, he was not a man at peace with himself. He had a skin disorder, a melatonin deficiency. He was, what they call albino. It was a very shameful thing to be at the time.” Her mouth dropped open when I said this, and she went “Ohhh.” I continued. “When I was born, when he saw me, he believed he had passed down a mutation.”

“But aint nothing wrong with your skin.”

“I’m sure he imagined that he was responsible for what’s wrong with me. One mutation begetting another.”

“There aint nothin wrong with you.” She traced her finger down the center of my chest to my stomach, then cupped my cock gently in her palm, massaging there momentarily before continuing further down, inserting one finger lightly into my cunt and wiggling 376

it. I moaned. “Everything seems to be just fine with you,” she said, smiling. I opened my mouth for a kiss like a happy little bird warm in her postcoital nest.

“I’m glad you think so,” I told her. She replaced her hand to my chest.

“And so he took you to Timbuktu to get born because it’s a magical place?”

“It’s not magical,” I laughed. Something in me felt ashamed. I was never sure how much of her was joking, how much was ignorant, and how much insane. All the more perplexing was the possibility of falling in love with a mind I did not understand or deem to respect. I kept holding onto the idea that it was merely sex, but one often finds one’s hands slippery when gripping that particular rope, moistening as it does, swelling and retracting the more you grasp and claw. “It’s not a magical place. But yes, it has a religious history and my father was a religious man. The last month my mother was pregnant with me, he went to the mosque every day to pray. That’s what my mother told me. My father came to Timbuktu to study at the university, and my mother had hopes of finding a position at a hospital, eventually. My father had a cousin there who they lived with during the pregnancy. My mother was no longer speaking to her family. They were Christian converts and disapproved of her marrying a Muslim man, and one so strange a one on top of it.”

“Aint it queer how, like with your daddy, us freaks sometimes more scared of each other than others are of us. That because we afraid to see what we are, you suppose?”

I rolled onto my stomach, placing my chin on my knuckles. A terror tightened my stomach. I repeated her words in my head, “afraid to see what we are; us freaks.” I rolled over onto my back and viewed her. “I suppose.” She lay on her side, her head propped on her hand, her breasts sloping to the side, her hip curved up.

“Well my mom always said it was magical, anyway.”

“Timbuktu? Your mother talked about Timbuktu?”

“Yeah, she said that was the place she wanted to go most in the Track Five: A Little Less Conversation

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world, all the way to Ten Buck Two. That and Siberia and New York City.”

“How odd.”

“I bet it aint your daddy’s fault at all. I’ll bet it was being born there that did it to you. That place is magical and it made you like that, a two-spirited.”

“A two-spirited?”

“That’s what it’s called. My mom saw Indians that told her all about things like that.” I learned quickly to ignore some of her more outlandish statements. “So then what happened after your daddy left cause you was born two-spirited?”

“Nothing. Life continued. My mother never told anyone. She raised me as her daughter. She worked as a nurse. Sometimes we traveled. Sometimes we lived in the same place for two to three years at a time. And then, when I was twelve years old, we were crossing the street, she was two steps in front of me, and a car hit her. That’s all.” I let the silence sway through my cold facade. She traced my tensed jaw with her finger.

“I’m sorry, Idrissa.”

“My aunt took me in. My mother’s sister, a Christian. She had three children and lived with her husband and my grandmother in a large house. They kept me for two years. But my secret became impossible to keep from the people I lived with. I shared a room with my female cousin, who was a year younger than me. I was almost fourteen. She saw me changing. It didn’t matter anyway.

I was already beginning to look much too masculine. They knew there was something off about me. They were in touch with our distant relatives in America, a professor here at Tulane and his wife. The professor and hs wife did missionary work in Africa during the summers, and my aunt and uncle had hosted them over the years. They had been thinking of adopting a child. They were old for having children. But they were altruistic people. It was decided that I would come live here with them, begin anew. So then they took me in. When they took me though, it felt more like I was 378

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being taken in. As though they were extending an undue charity to someone who had an awful hand dealt. With my aunt, it had just felt like what family should do. In Africa, I’d always been a girl, and I lived with family. When I came to America, I became a boy, and I lived grateful for their charity. My adopted parents taught me to continue to keep my secret. They tried to correct it and took me several times to a specialist, a surgeon. But finally, I never had any surgery, mostly due to my adamant refusals. They accepted, because I was so old, so far along in my physical development.”

“You said no? Why? Doesn’t that feel right to you? I mean, being a man?”

My right hand shook with unconscious anxiety. I’d never said this so clearly to anyone before. “No. Neither one feels right. I’m both.” I expelled a small laugh and a calm smile lit up my face.

“I’m both. I’m neither. Of course, I couldn’t say that then. I simply lived as a male and refused surgery.”

“But you’re still living like that.”

I looked at her questioning, innocent gaze, which seemed so unafraid of anything. I wondered if it was innocence or ignorance that gave her that unabashed courage. What was the difference between the two, anyway? Both of them, I supposed, were honest, but one of them was often fatally mistaken. “This is how I have to live if I want to be something to the world besides . . .”

“Besides what?”

I stopped myself. I was going to say, a freak, but thought better of it. “Besides, well, it’s just not practical. There are two boxes; male, female. There’s no other. There’s no way to live as an other.”

“I met lots of people living lots of ways. You might be surprised.”

“It’s different when it’s not your choice.”

“Way I see it, it’s all our choice,” she told me. I shrugged. She rolled back onto her stomach and began picking at my hair, petting my head. “I didn’t know you saw your mom die, too. That’s something else we got in common, and that’s a hard one.”

I sat up on my elbow. “You saw your mother die?”

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“Yeah, like I told you.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“Sure, I told you already.”

“No you haven’t.” I traced her back gingerly with my fingertips.

“I told you. I done fed my momma to a tiger when I was little, then I run away.”

I groaned and shoved the sheet aside, swinging my feet to the floor. “I would prefer you just admit you don’t want to talk to me about whatever did happen to your mother than to hear these ridiculous lies.”

“It aint no lie.”

“Okay.” I rubbed my eyes wearily and stood. “Sure. However you like it.”

“You’re the one keeps secrets, not me.”

“I’m not keeping anything from you.”

“Naw, but from everybody else in this world you are.” She looked to the wall and chewed her nails nervously. “I aint keeping nothing from nobody, specially you.”

I placed my hands on my hips. “Fine.” I said her name. “Where was this tiger that killed your momma?”

“In a cage.”

“I mean, where in the country?”

“Indiana.”

I laughed loudly. “A wild tiger in Indiana?”

“No, it was an albino tiger. It was captured. I told you, by that old boy whose brother gave me my Aryan.”

“Aryan?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s her name.”

“Your white horse’s name is Aryan? I’m sure you didn’t tell me that. And you just now came up with this albino scenario, did you?

An albino named Aryan! Terrific.” I was extremely perturbed and beginning to become offended.

“Oh well, now look at the look on your face now. That’s why I didn’t tell you that.” She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. “I don’t 380

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need no lecture on it. I didn’t name the damned horse. It was that Hank who thought himself a goose-stepper. He breeds albino things.”

My face dropped. “A white supremacist named Hank breeding albino animals?” She nodded and cleaned her nails, not looking at me. At this point, I was beginning to doubt there even was a horse, white or any other color.

“Anyway, she aint just white, she’s a real albino. Got red eyes like those mouses and ferrets you probably seen. Like your daddy.”

“Are you crazy? My father did not have red . . .” I burst out, but stopped myself. She tensed and exhaled through pursed lips like a child being reprimanded. “Forget it!” I waved my hand in the air and walked to the door. “I’m going to make myself a drink. You want one?” She didn’t respond, but bounced her foot off her knee, her eyes slanted in frustration.

After having resisted the urge to smoke a cigarette again for the first time in several years, I returned with our drinks. I could overlook this ridiculousness for one more night. That’s what I’d kept telling myself night after night; it’s just one more night. She means nothing to me but a warm body. Pay her no attention. She’ll be gone soon.

She was standing on the other side of the bedroom, naked in front of my bookshelf. “Who’s that old guy looking like God up there?”

I followed her view. “That man up there looking like God is Karl Marx.” I sat the drinks down on the bedside table and stood beside her. She ran her finger along the shelf.

“Looks like you got everything he ever wrote here. What’s his books about? He write mysteries or something?”

“Well, no. They are perplexing to many though.”

She tapped at the black and white photo of Marx’s puffed, serious face printed on the spine. “He sure does have a big head.”

I removed it from the shelf and sat down on the bed, flipping through.

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“You gonna read me some?”

“Oh I doubt you would like it.” Her eyebrows squirmed. “Not that I don’t think you would understand,” I explained. “Just that he’s not entertaining.”

“That’s him there in that picture on the wall too?” She plopped down next to me. “Looks like he’s your favorite writer and he aint even entertaining?”

“No, well, it’s not that kind of writing. It’s nonfiction, theory and analysis.”

“What’s he analyzin?” She took the book and turned it over in her hands. “Capital,” she read. “What’s this one about?”

She lay on her back and held the book open. I reclined next to her. “This book is about . . .” I searched for words, “Capitalizing, how and why it happens, what it means to capitalize on something; the effects of capitalism, loosely.”

“Capitalizing?”

“Yes.” “Oh I know all about that.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, sure. I learned that.” She flipped onto her stomach looking happy to have found some common ground. “Capitalizing on something is a how you show ownership.” She said this obviously repeating the words someone had taught her in near exact order.

“If something’s not, like you said, capitalized on, then it’s just what it is a . . . gener . . . gener . . . ?

“Generic?”

“Yeah, generic. It’s just a generic thing. But if you capitalize on it, it like gets a personality, it’s a specific thing. It’s owned. It’s got its own individual identity. It’s a more important thing.”

I nodded, “Because its value is increased.”

“Yeah, it increases its value just by giving it a specific label.”

“Well that is along the lines of a theory he has in here called Commodity Fetishism.” I was impressed and surprised. “Where did you learn about this?”

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“Oh, well.” She closed the book. “I have had some schooling. I remember that much.”

“They taught that in school?”

“Sure. It’s like, a river’s just a river. But if it’s the Mississippi River, then river gets capitalized on. You gotta capitalize on it.

Like, a mower’s just a mower, but if it’s a John Deere Lawn Mower, then it aint just any old generic mower, it’s branded, it’s capitalized on, John Deere Mower.”

“Oh, right. I see. Of course they did.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Hmm? Nothing. Nothing.” Again, I was trumped. Again, she understood but did not understand. Again, I was left staring into her happy face wondering who was the wiser, wondering if we had ever, even for a moment, bridged that ephemeral river of understanding and met at a cross path. Or were we just perched on opposite sides of the blackened gulf shouting each other’s names into a wind blowing our own voices back? More striking than that fear was the overwhelming sensation that even if it were true we were only responding to echoes, it mattered little. The substance of love is insoluble, and whatever, she gave me reason to call out. The return was not the goal, but the urge to beckon was its own end.

“You touched upon some interesting ties between the rules of our language and use value,” I told her.

“Use value!” She giggled.

“Yes, how much a thing is worth in relation to its usefulness.”

She swung her legs over me. “What’s my use value?” she asked playfully, then laid a bite on my neck.

I took her by the waist and moved her. “I think that would be more of a subject of labor value,” I laughed.

She sat up in a jolt and looked me in the eye. “Hey, you can’t make me pregnant, can you?” the sea is life , bearer of the black opulence of existence’s possibilities. You float on the surface and snatch up shining fishes to

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devour. You imagine strange horrors in the depths. Bathed by sunlight you stand at the edge and toe the gold line cautiously, dipping perhaps below the surface momentarily, but always returning to the safety of your half-life, frugality of the dyadic copia. But now and then, the sea rises. In moments, the sea overtakes, swallowing one in its mysteries. Misericordia Domini inter pontem et fonten. The glories of the possible are mine.

I am barren as the wasted land flooded with the dark wealth.

I don’t know if I have ever wanted children. Probably because I have always known that I could not ever take part in that most ultimate act of simultaneous narcissism and self-execution. But so what? I am already twofold and hung. she lived with me for three months. I tried to keep her as I have kept myself, hidden away, a lewd collection of unspeakable images enjoyed only in privacy. For a while, she accepted it. I don’t know where she spent her days (she told me she was asking around for her supposed horse), but at night she was there, waiting for me, sometimes even with a burnt supper prepared. I went with her in public as little as possible. She must have known, must have felt the sting of my embarrassment. I was ashamed of her and afraid as well for what she might reveal of me. I acted cowardly, I admit.

But for a while, she accepted it, and foolishly I believed we could go on that way, cocooned in my room, slipping between food, sex, and conversations, which were endless. Her capacity for speech is matched only by her libido. And like her sexual proclivities, I often found her conversation wildly abandoned, touched with more than a tinge of lunacy and not only leaning toward, but falling into the exceptionally offensive.

All of the nights those months seem to me now to have flowed together into one long stream, one protracted night of an indulgent and tedious banquet of intimacy. For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to love someone honestly. The sight of her asleep beside me, uncurling her legs from mine as I rose in the morning,

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filled me with endless wonder each day. She was my secret wish come to life, and she hardly seemed real, as flawed and strange as her ignorance was, she loved me with an innocence I did not believe possible.

Every time I returned home and turned the key, I wondered if she would be gone, thought briefly that I might find my apartment empty and be forced to admit what I had always suspected, that she was just a figment of my imagination.

But no. There she is, standing over my oak dining table amid my ordered shelves and polished things, pouring a beer into a glass next to a bowl of overcooked pasta, armored in her black tutu and boots. She turns to me, smiles. Her glistening mouth opens, a hole of arousing disorder, and we begin for the last time. in retrospect , i see what brought her to it. Each night I came

home and let unravel the tensed yarn of my undoing. She sensed my unease, and I could tell it bothered her. She wished to relieve me of my burdens. I didn’t realize just how much.

“How was work? You win yet?”

Although I explained to her repeatedly, in detail, the nature of my work, I never felt she understood what I was saying. I was simply unwinding. “No, we didn’t win yet.” I dropped a pile of pamphlets onto the coffee table and hung up my coat. “I’m beginning to wonder what winning would even look like.”

She took a pamphlet and read aloud, “Mixed income housing is a lie!” She intoned the exclamation and placed it back onto the table.

“They’re moving right along with two more projects.” I sighed heavily. “I can’t believe it’s being allowed to continue this way.

We’re holding another demonstration at the end of the week in front of the same building.” I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. “Maybe that will get some press, at least,” I hollered.

“You getting more people this time?”

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two other groups.” She handed me my beer. I sipped it. “We’re looking at about three hundred now.”

“Wow. That’s a lot. You all gonna tear that thing down this time, finally?”

Now this was something she asked often, and something perhaps I should have paid more attention to. But I brushed it off as the inclination of a mind unaccustomed to the processes of advocacy and bureaucracy. “No,” I laughed, “we will never tear anything down.”

“Well now, why not?” She sat the plates on the table. I took the spoon and served us. “They’re tearing your stuff down. You said they tore down those project buildings there aint nothing wrong with. They tore down people’s houses. You say they’re just clearing out the poor folks, aint no way to stop em. Why don’t you tear theirs down? Seems like you got enough to do it. It aint like the bricks all been laid yet or anything.” She looked thoughtfully to the ceiling. “But even so . . .”

I scratched my head and smirked at the thought. “Well, that wouldn’t be legal.” I took a bite of pasta, sucking up a long saucy strand that smacked me on the nose.

“Legal?” She shook her fork at me. “Who cares about legal? My momma always said, ‘Aint nothing legal that ends well.’”

“What?”

She leaned in on one elbow. “Listen Drissi, you think you’re legal, hunn? Ha! You think I’m legal? You think this spaghetti’s legal?” She snorted through her nose, then scooped up a large bite of pasta and chewed it fiercely in my direction, shaking her head no.

When we finished our dinners, we retired to the living room, me sitting on the couch, writing up a proposal, while she stood in a corner she had cleared for herself, and practiced her juggling.

I don’t know how I got any work done during those months. She never allowed me more than thirty minutes’ silence, and even that was backlit by the sound of the balls passing from palm to palm.

“You know, Drissi,” she came, interrupting my scribbling. “All 386

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this stuff I do gives me time for my mind to go blank, just wander around and get things, like when I sat for those boys, and riding Aryan, and this juggling here. I let my mind go out and it comes back with some good stuff when it comes.” I turned from the couch to view her. The balls were still going. Her red lips pinched and quivered as her eyes followed their spiral. She looked so out of place in the corner of my living room, like a child’s fantasy appearing, a harlequin juggling near the window intoning strange prophesies. “It seems to me,” she went on, “it occurred to me just now that all life’s like this, juggling three balls.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well that’s it, aint it? That’s all you got, these three balls you’re always juggling till you aint juggling no more. You got the one ball, that’s yourself, that’s who you are and how you be and being made to be and all. Then you got the second ball, the things that aren’t you that you love and want to keep and keep safe. Then you got that third ball, the things you can’t live with, the things you want to be changing. If you don’t got three balls, you aint juggling, you aint living.”

“If you don’t have three balls, you’re not living?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, what if you have five balls? I’ve seen you do that before.

What does that mean?”

“Oh, that’s just extra fancy stuff. Good for you if you can do that. But those extras are going off of those first three. The main thing is the three.”

“Interesting.” I turned back to my paper and scratched the first few letters of the word advocate when I was once again cut short by her musings.

“Seems to me like you just got one ball you’re playing with.”

I put the paper down. It was useless. “I’m sorry. You said I’ve only got one ball?”

“Yep. And you can’t be juggling with one ball. You can’t be living. You just tossing it up in the air and catching and tossing it back up and catching it and . . .”

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“I get the idea.” She was demonstrating for me. The ball fell again into her hand. She held it out. “Which ball is that, the one I got?” I asked, humoring her.

“I’ll tell you which ones you don’t got first. You got yourself here,” she held out the ball. “But you aint juggling with that.” She shoved that ball into the back of her skirt. “You got that tucked down way down deep in your back pocket where no one can get to it, less they know how to do the bump-and-pick.”

“Okay.”

“And then the things you love and want to keep. Well, I don’t even think you know where that ball is.” She tossed the second ball over her shoulder. It rolled through the bedroom door. “You just got the things you can’t accept, the things you want to change ball. You just tossing that ball up and down all day.” The third and final remaining ball sprung from her palm and shot up into the air. “See, it’s just a straight line, up and down. That’s all it is. The things you can’t accept and want to change, that’s all you’re tossing and it’s just tossing just keeps coming back.”

I sighed heavily. “What is this, circus therapy?”

“I’m just saying.” She crossed the room and sat next to me. She looked like a doll.

“That’s what you’re thinking about when you’re juggling, my life management skills?”

She clicked her tongue at the ceiling and snuggled into the cushion. “I’m thinking about a lot of things. About me and you, and why I feel the way I do about you.”

“How’s that?”

Her cheeks reddened and a girlish smile rose on her lips. “You know how.” I put my arm around her and cuddled her close. She played with the hem of my sweater. “It’s good I found you.” She burrowed her nose into my arm and scratched it that way. Especially in the most casual moments between us, I was surprised to find myself immersed in such domestic cupidity. “I stopped for you, you know?”

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“Stopped what?”

“I’m not looking for her like I should be, and she’s that thing, one of those things I love that I gotta keep.”

“Your horse?”

“Yeah. I been asking around and it seems like she might still be in Louisiana. Do you know where Baton Rouge is?”

“It’s just a couple hours away.”

“Well, someone said he heard of a weird horse, might be her, up on a farm between here and there.”

“That’s a lot of space, between here and there.”

“You drive?”

“No, unfortunately, I never got my license.”

“Me neither. You know how to ride?”

“A horse? Yes.” She nodded approvingly. “See, that’s why I like you. You and me got things in common, things from other times and places. Like how you can say my name right like no one else can do. Probably because you got a little Bushman in you.”

She just rested her head on my shoulder and clicked her tongue casually at the ceiling. The statement struck me hard in the wrong place. I stiffened and swallowed dryness. I could feel my shoulders burning with anger and resentment. I pulled my arm away and turned to face her dumbfounded, white countenance. “Are you out of your mind?” (I constructed my reaction as a question which had already been answered long ago.)

“What? What’s got yer panties in a wad?” She balked at my expression and repositioned herself in a crouching position. “I say something wrong?”

I stared at her in silence, twisting around possible responses.

The urge swelled in me to simply toss her out the door and be done with this nonsense once and for all. I stood. “Why the hell would you think I have ‘Bushman in me?’”

Her face squinted up and her eyes darted side to side in apparent confusion. “Well, don’t ya? I mean, you’re from Africa and all.”

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My mouth actually dropped open. I began taking part in a strange mix of hiccupping, laughing and hyperventilating. “Africa and all? Africa is big!” I spread my arms over my head. “It’s an entire continent! You know that? I don’t know what you Americans think when you think of Africa, but I will tell you something. I’ve never drank goat’s blood or worshiped the devil.” I paced around the couch. “We had an apartment, with a roof, proper beds, running water.” I laughed aloud. “And, yes, a television even. I know that’s important to you people. My God! I’ll bet you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Jeez.” She cocked her head and folded her arms like a child against my lecture. “If it was so great there, why’d you stay here?” she mumbled.

“What did you say?” I asked aggressively. She shook her head no and looked to the ground. “What did you say? Why did I stay here? Is that what you said?”

“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset. You can hate yourself however you want. Seems like you got lots of ways. Me, I got no problem with Bushmen and I like you for it.”

I smacked my open palm on the arm of the couch. “I am not descended from . . . Bushmen, as you so crudely put it.”

She turned herself around. “Way I was told, we all descended from Bushmen, sometime. You’re just closer to it, that’s all. Aint nothing to be ashamed of. You should be proud to be a little bit Bushman. My mom always said they was the best people in the world. That’s why she named me like that and wanted to go to Tin Buck Two.” “There are no Bushmen in Timbuktu!” I said firmly, loudly. “And they’re called San, by the way. Not that you would know that. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then the words fell from my mouth, “Uneducated white trash.”

Her face fell into total despair. I legitimized my rage with further rage. “You like being with me because you think I’m a mythical Bushman creature from the magical land of Tin Buck Two? Ha! 390

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Oh no, a two-spirited, you said. Maybe a two-spirited Bushman?”

I tossed my hands in the air and went from the room, paced a few laps around the kitchen and came back in, finding her in the same position I’d left her, staring wide-eyed and sullen at the wall, her eyes reddening with oncoming tears.

I stopped at the edge of the room. My arms fell to my side.

“Look,” I began timidly, “you just can’t say things like that. It’s offensive. You aren’t thinking before you speak.”

“I decided to stop doin that a long time ago.” She kept her arms folded and directed her monologue to the ceiling. “Used to be, when I thought before I spoke, I wouldn’t say nothing. Then one day I opened my jaw and let it start singing and yapping. Maybe you want me to go back to that shack in the woods and just start singing to the trees again? Can’t say nothing to nobody don’t make em all uppity. Maybe I should. Maybe that would be better. I’ll live like a lone Bushman, fine.”

It’s a curious thing; sometimes when one goes too far, the inclination persists to go further still, because you’re no longer able see the point from which you started that you so cherished. Everything we had not been saying was coming out. “What are you talking about? It’s this sort of talk that makes me scared to go out in public with you.”

She wiped away the tears that never fell with the sleeve of her shirt and squared her jaw. “I aint the only one saying things that’s wrong. I never called you nothing so bad as what you said to me: trash.”

“You never called me anything so bad.” I corrected her.

Anger set like a dark devil on her face and I realized, although I had seen her upset, I had never seen her truly angry before. She stood and approached me, slowly, steadily. I thought she might be coming to kill me. “See, there you go. You know how to talk real good. What you acting ashamed of ? You think you’re better than me anyway.” I forgot sometimes that she was at the age where she was still growing, still changing and adapting, baby soft and Track Five: A Little Less Conversation

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changing with every touch. Everything about her seemed to age ten years in those few seconds. She gave me a cold smile. “Thing is though, I can learn to talk like you, I guess if I try. But I’m not lookin to wipe all my dirt away, cause I like the way it smells.” She held two fingers under my nose. “You like the way it smells too, don’tcha?” I stiffened away from her. She tilted her head up, meeting my hard gaze. “I was black one day, you know? I ever tell you that? It wasn’t easy, but I wasn’t ashamed of it even though some others were. Sure I can clean mine off, most of my dirt if I tried, probably. But you aint ever gonna be able to clean off yours. Thing is, I don’t wanna clean any of mine off and I can. See what I’m saying? You can’t and you want to so bad. That’s what’s killin ya.”

Part of her statement jabbed and angered me, while much of it I found too perplexing to conjure any real response. I just shook my head no and leaned back against the wall. I felt numb and tired. “Right now, you’re what’s killing me.”

She laughed, “Naaaahhhh. You’d know if I was killin ya.” Her eyes flashed like two sharp knife blades. “I know the reason you’re scared to go out with me, and, yeah, I did notice, but I never said nothing because I was loving you with your cowardly and all, the same way I guess you love me with my trash and all.”

I said her name. “I know I shouldn’t have talked like that, but you go too far. You’re still saying these awful things, you don’t even know are awful.”

“You say things you know are wrong. That’s worse.”

“Excuse me? Ignorance is not an excuse when you say something hurtful! I’m supposed to forgive every white idiot for the last hundred years, I suppose?”

“I aint apologizing. You should apologize!” she shouted.

“For what?”

“You’re the one who’s really ashamed of me. Not the other way around, whatever’s been said. You’re the one up on the high road.

You can’t even tell anyone you know you know me,” she squealed, like something long held in being expelled.

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I said her name again and held my hand out. “Stop.”

She patted my hand away. “It’s good. No, it’s good. I’m glad we’re finally talkin about it,” she jeered at me. I bit the inside of my lip till it swelled. “Tell the truth. It aint cause I say something wrong sometimes. You’re afraid to go out with me cause you don’t want anyone to know you’re half dyke, half man. You don’t want anyone to know you’re making it with, how’d you so elgantly put it, uneducated white trash?”

I hissed and shoved her aside with my hand. “Stop it now.”

She pivoted and stomped her black boot on the floor. “You don’t get to tell me when to stop and when to start.”

“What do you want from me?” I turned and began shouting again. “You want me to march into the office tomorrow and tell them I’m not a man, but, oh I’m not a woman either? Everyone will be fine with that? Huh? There’s not even a word for that, you know. Mr. Mrs. Mizz? What? Oh and here, here,” I was becoming hysterical, acting out the scene. “Here is my lover. Oh yes, oh yes, Kevin, she’s a little white queer, in a black tutu who juggles and talks like a brilliant hillbilly. She’s looking for her horse named Hitler. It’s albino. It has red eyes . . . like my daddy!” I was laughing in an absurdly panicked state. I fell to the couch cackling, holding my stomach, tears streaming down my cheeks. Saying it all out loud, even in that fitted condition, brought some clarity to my situation.

When my laughing began to cease she was standing over me, her arms crossed, tapping her foot tepidly on the floor. “Yeah, I guess so. That is what I want you to do. Why not?”

“Why not!” I threw my hands into the air and another laughing fit took me. “Why not?”

“This isn’t a joke, Drissi. That’s what I’d do if I was you.”

I sat up. “Yes, and I suppose that is why you are where you are and I am where I am. Because of these subtle differences in the nature of our choices.” My voice rose and fell with the remnants of laughter. I was still recovering from my bout of hysterics. She didn’t seem to find any humor in my speech.

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“Where you are and where I am? I thought we’ve both been together, right here, together, in the same place for a while now.

Hmmm. How do you like them apples?” She left the room and returned with a bag in her hand. She calmly made her way about, collecting her things.

“What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Are you leaving? You can’t just leave.”

She didn’t turn to look at me as she placed her balls in the bag.

“Well there you’re wrong. That’s one thing I’ve got real good at doing.”

“Just calm down. We’re having a fight, that’s all.”

She went back into the bedroom. I could see her through the doorway, hurriedly packing up the rest. “Oh yeah? Is that all?” she hollered. “So you’re gonna change something. Stop treating me like a weird pet you got hidden away. If it’s just a fight and we’re really together, I guess that means you’re gonna take me out tomorrow and introduce me to your friends?”

I went to the doorway and stood, solemn now. “Friends?” I smiled and sighed, shaking my head at the admittance. “What friends?”

Her expression, for a moment, became one of pity. This was my vulnerable spot. She was my only intimacy, and she knew it. She squared her jaw against softening. “Jeez, even I got friends here, aint even my city.” I looked to the floor. “Drissi, I aint yer pet, you know. I aint no dog. You can’t just keep me locked up and come home and play with me at night.”

“I never meant to . . .”

She moved past me, bags in hand, and went to the door. “So, then,” she turned back, “you gonna introduce me around to those folks at work tomorrow? Take me to lunch? Hmm? You gonna do that?”

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rightfully being angry with her, I found myself at the end in the position of apology, of correcting my behavior. I was seeking her forgiveness and burdened with making the reparatory move. i have never harbored such anticipation for lunchtime. I’ve

seen my coworkers do it. I’ve seen Lisa touch up her lipstick, happily proclaiming, “I have a date,” before an awkward young man stepped quietly through the door to take her out. Kevin had introduced us casually to two of his past girlfriends. Dan and Jeanette also have friends and relatives who stop by occasionally at this sacred time. Noon. There the hands went. Fifteen minutes remaining. I don’t know who I was more afraid for, them or her. No, it was me. I was most afraid for myself. My “lunch date” would not quietly step through the door, shake hands, nod, ask a few innocuous questions, and take me out for a nice meal, no. No matter how many times I played out possible scenarios in my mind, no matter how many times in those few hours I devised strategies for getting her in and out as quickly as possible, without her noticing she was being herded, of course, because this was the point of this visit, to prove I could be comfortable with her in public, I could not envision the scene without at least one irrevocable incident. Time seemed to lurch forward as if breaking down under the weight of my anxiety. I felt the sensation of an impending air raid. I was about to drop a bomb on all of us, and they were not even aware.

Any moment, she would be there, standing in my world with me, face to face with my life and those who made it up. Kevin was hacking away, nose to the screen, his eyes already glazing, typing up a grant report. Dan was shuffling in his drawers. Lisa and Jeanette quietly chatted while marking up some old pamphlets. I supposed I should give them some warning.

I stood and rearranged the little things on my desk, fumblingly, and proceeded to knock a couple of knickknacks to the floor. The two women looked up. “Hey guys.” I coughed into my fist. “Hey everyone,” I tried. I could barely get the words out, as if announcing Track Five: A Little Less Conversation

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it would speed up her arrival. I see now how strange and sad it was that I gave so much weight to the opinions of these four. But that office was almost my entire life. With the exception of casual acquaintances who repeated themselves in the bars and cafés I trafficked, and the light bonds I had made with my fellow residents over the years, those people in that office were my entire life. “Someone’s going to be coming here in a minute to pick me up for lunch.”

Why didn’t it sound the same? Perhaps it was because I had never said it. Perhaps it was the embarrassed way I said it. But when I said it, it was not taken as a casual statement. Kevin looked up from his screen, raising a curious brow. Dan stopped shuffling in his drawer and folded his arms. All eyes were on me. Lisa and Jeanette shrugged at each other, smiling nervously. In their faces, I saw girlish excitement, the masked excitement of uncovering something vulnerable, sweet, and human in the generally guarded person with whom they had spent much time. Their boss on top of it. Lisa proceeded cautiously, trying not to scare away the small, uneasy squirrel, myself being the squirrel. “Oh? Who’s coming?”

“A girl.” I was devolving into a teenager. I looked down, fingering the corner of my desk as I said those holy little words, a girl, just a girl. Realizing this, I blushed and bent down to pick up my fallen statues. Perhaps Kevin would chastise me for not calling her a woman. But they would soon see, she was a girl.

The words struck my back. “You got a date, Idrissa?” Dan asked, forcing a spirit of pleasantry into the conversation. And I suppose this is a normal question for one man to ask another in the way he asked it. Although it is typically something reserved for crime novels, I spun round, then stood replacing my figurines. Dan pursed his lips and shrugged, not knowing how to respond to my awkward gesticulations. I looked at the clock. This conversation thus far had only taken up two minutes’ time, and yet it seemed to be stretching out into infinity.

“No, not a date. Well yes, a lunch date.” I waved my hand, swatting a fly and sat down in my chair. Jeanette picked up a pamphlet 396

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and pretended to read it, eyeing Lisa, apparently amused. There Jeanette sat, the perfect specimen of the new generation of young black American girls, wide-eyed, optimistic, polite, sharing secret glances and jokes with her friend and coworker, little blonde Lisa.

I knew what she was thinking, what she was expecting: some tall, well-educated black woman, some Angela Davis sort, or perhaps she expected more of the liberal, WASP kind to come waltzing in, make gracious introductions and take me away. Then they would all finally see what kind of woman was my type, and off I would go, to lunch, to dates, to marriage, to human, finally in their eyes, a multilayered man, who thankfully found some life outside of work, some highly compatable companion with whom to share my intellect, my political passions, my body, and my home. I knew what they were thinking. Or maybe I didn’t but I thought I did, and I needed to warn them of just how wrong their thinking was. “She’s not. It’s not . . .” I tapped my pen. “She’s white,” I said, almost directly to Jeanette. What was happening to me? That girl was infecting me, possessing me.

“Ohhhkay.” Kevin looked about in confusion.

Jeanette laughed audibly and held the pamphlet up over her face. Lisa folded her hands to her cheek and grimaced, mouthing what seemed to be “Oh my God” at her friend.

“I think they allow that now, Drissi,” Dan joked. They were laughing at me.

“No, I know. I didn’t mean . . .” Ten minutes left. “It’s just someone I’ve been giving a place to stay.” Oh God, why was I continuing? Now they would think I’d shacked up with her, which I’d suddenly realized, I had, like a lesbian cliché. “You know, until she finds a place to stay . . . that’s not with me. She’s from the country.”

“The country. What country?” Kevin asked.

“She’s from Indiana,” I nearly shouted, as if that might explain everything away.

“Well, we’ll make sure to buzz her in,” Dan said, repositioning his chair.

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“She’s a bit odd.” The words came out of my mouth as an obvious warning. Everyone stared at me silently, all with the same questioning smirk of tension. Luckily for me, the phone rang. Dan answered. It was the senator.

“Line one,” he said.

“Right.” He transferred the call to my desk and work resumed, almost as before.

I was lost in one of those long, multilayered conversations with a politician who never said just what he meant, so I was forced to assume his code speak, which was taking up most of my thoughts when the buzzer sounded. I heard the door open and close. Kevin stood and went to greet her in the small corridor that opens to the office. I heard their muffled voices. “Hi, I’m Kevin, you must be?” I cringed and hated myself for it. The thought of hearing her name, just her name spoken aloud in mixed company, was enough to set me on edge.

“Mya. You can call me Mya.” Well, well, I thought, even she makes compromises. Everyone makes compromises. But the senator, today, was taking it too far. He was backing completely out of any possible support of our campaign. “You know I am behind your organization one hundred percent, but now just isn’t the right time . . .”

“Now is the time,” I tried. “Senator, people are looking up to you for guidance on this.”

“That’s what makes it a difficult time. I’m in a position of being carefully watched on this. Too much money and too many jobs will be lost at a time when we are supposed to be rebuilding.”

I was losing my war. Three years of my life, and I was losing more totally than I had imagined possible. “We are in the majority, senator. Most people don’t see it as re-building.”

Dan and Lisa stood as she entered and shook hands with her.

“Idrissa will be off the phone in a second,” Dan told her. “Do you want something to drink?”

I watched her, keeping my ear to the phone.

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“Sure, if you got mixers,” she popped happily.

Dan laughed, “Oh no, just coffee or juice. It’s a little early for all that.”

“Juice then.” Dan went into the kitchen.

“Just don’t make a move then. You don’t have to back us, but don’t back the condos. We are in the majority here.” I tried to stay firm.

“Like I said,” the senator’s voice rasped, “it’s a bad time, and majority or not, sometimes it’s quantity over quality, and sometimes it’s the other way around.”

“Quality?!?”

“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m just saying there are other issues for me besides votes. I’m still behind you though, in spirit. I really am.”

“All right Senator. But this isn’t the last of it.”

“I’m sure.”

Lisa and Kevin took up chatting as I hung up the phone. When I heard it click, my politeness also clicked off. “Goddamnit!” I slammed down the receiver.

“What happened?” Kevin asked.

I rubbed my weary eyes and fell into my chair. “We lost. It’s over. It’s completely over. Not only is the construction moving forward, from what it sounded like, they’re going to move forward with the demolition of the ninth ward project as well. I guess this will set the precedent.”

“No!’ Jeanette covered her mouth with her hands. Kevin shouted some choice expletives.

“I’m sorry, Drissa.” He handed Mya a glass of juice. “We did the best we could. Win some, lose some.”

“Are we just going to let it go?” Lisa asked.

“We don’t have a choice. Like I said, it’s over.” I looked at apparently Mya sipping her juice, quietly watching me with sorrowful eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t except this today.” I stood. “I’ll just be a second. Dan, we need to schedule an emergency meeting for three, let our organizers know.”

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“Sure.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her again. “I guess everyone has already introduced themselves.” In the wake of this news, her presence didn’t seem so outlandish or overwhelming. Attention had been usurped.

“Yeah, they did.” She crumpled her empty glass and tossed it in the trash can. “Lisa,” she pointed. Lisa nodded back. “Jean, Dan, and Kevin.” I got an aspirin out of my drawer and swallowed it.

“So it’s just over?” she asked. “You’re just quitting?”

“We did everything we could.” Kevin told her, dejectedly.

“Idrissa killed himself over this campaign.” She nodded and silently read Kevin’s T-shirt. I collected my papers and put them in my satchel.

“I like that. That’s right,” she said emphatically, pointing. “See, Idrissa. Some other people think the way I been saying about it.

You all should get a group out there and just tear that damned thing down now.”

Kevin tugged on his shirt and reread it: Activism IS NOT Terrorism. “What do you mean?” he asked.

I waved my hand in the air, wishing to silence her. “Now’s not the time.”

Kevin raised an eyebrow at me. “Let her speak her mind. It’s fine.”

She looked to me warily. My face pinched and hardened. My eyes begged her to keep silent. “Aw, nothing,” she went on cautiously, for her. “I just think your shirt’s right is all.”

“In what way?” Kevin probed.

“Well, like, it depends on why you do something what makes it one or the other. Like those Weather Underground people were doing activism.”

Kevin leaned his chair back and folded his arms, an expression of thoughtful disturbance visible through his facial hair. “Actually, what they did was pretty clearly terrorism, whatever your definition.”

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“I don’t know, Kevin,” Lisa chirped. “Not everyone agrees with that.” She held a finger in the air. “Mya is it? What do you think?

Did you hear about that Arab woman in Saint Louis?”

“She weren’t Arab. She was Indian. The kind with the dot, not the feather.”

Something began to click in me. “I didn’t know you were following the news.” I stepped around my desk, jacket and satchel in hand. Her eyes met mine, sparkling like her red lips.

“Did you say the dot not the feather?” Dan chuckled and shook his head. “Where’d you find this one, Idrissa? She’s something else.

I guess I’m the kind with the feather?” He winked at her. He was taking it in good humor. Looking at her then, I wondered if there was any other way to take her. She appeared so absurd and strange, it must render her harmless to many. Her striped socks, matching that day, I supposed for our date, her boots and black tutu, glittery makeup and childish stance; she did not seem to hold much power to them. She did not seem a threat. But she did hold power over me. It was more than just knowing the secret of my sex. The power she held over me was the tremendous power anyone holds over their lover. She had seen through me, seen me beg. She watched me grow to need her love and something in me hated her for what she had witnessed, as if she had witnessed me murdering myself.

“You’re Indian?” Dan nodded. Mya stared at him like he was a mythical creature, like she stared at me sometimes, and like everyone else in the room was staring at her. “My mom used to see an Indian man.”

“Oh?” “Yeah.”

“She was dating . . .”

“Nah, seeing. She had visions. You know about that stuff ?”

“Mya,” I stepped forward and placed my hand on her shoulder.

“That’s not . . .” I shook my head at her, trying to remain tender. “Why, why, why does she have to talk to everyone, so much?” I thought.

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“It’s okay, Idrissa.” Dan nodded and gave Mya a small smile.

Lisa and Jeanette looked worried. Lisa rummaged loudly through her drawer. “What did she see?” Dan asked.

Mya looked to me as if for permission to go on. I shrugged.

What could I do? She was her own person. If she was going to turn my office into a space of racist clichés, visions, and terrorist theories, that’s what she was going to do. I suppose I knew that already.

“Well, she saw . . .” Something came over her face, something very vulnerable and sentimental. “Before she passed on, she used to tell me how she seen, when I was little, this Indian man, but like from old times with the feathers and a bow and all, riding on a white horse. He took her away once, she said.”

Dan rested his chin between his finger and thumb. His mouth curled down at the sides. I waited. Was he upset or merely thinking it over? Work had halted. Everyone in the room was watching and waiting for some sign of what they should feel. “The horse was white?”

Mya nodded.

“Was he white, the man on the horse, white like snow, like powder?”

She scrunched her brows and shrugged. “I don’t know. I think she said he was regular colored, like you.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.” “Why?” I asked.

Dan placed his hands flatly on the desk and sighed. “Because it might be Aisoyimstan your mother saw. God rest her.”

“Asoya, what?” Kevin asked.

“Aisoyimstan.” Dan gave Mya a pointed look. In his eyes was the hint of someone kindly placating a child. “He’s the bringer of snow. He’s also the keeper of Chaos, some say. It’s a Blackfoot legend. He’s the only one I can think of who rides a white horse.

He’s white as well, snow white, so he is hard to spot in the winter.

Was it winter when she saw him?”

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She shook her head. “No, I’m pretty sure it was summer.”

“Oh, then it’s less likely. But who knows?”

“You believe in that stuff ?” Kevin asked.

Dan turned to Kevin, stretched back in his chair and popped his knuckles above his head. “Sure, I guess, as much as anything. I know it. I know the legends.” Dan stood and extended his hand to Mya. “Nice meeting you. You should take this one to lunch before the hour is over.” He was being charitably kind.

She waved goodbye to everyone. I took her to a small café around the block. We sat across from each other chewing our sandwiches trying to make small talk, both of our minds obviously elsewhere.

“You shouldn’t have said that to Dan,” I told her.

“Which one was Dan?” “The one with the feather, as you put it. You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“I’m sorry.” She squirmed in her chair. “How should I say it?”

“Well,” I thought. “I don’t know. But you wouldn’t like to be talked about that way.”

“What way?”

“In those sweeping terms.”

“But I wasn’t talking about him. I was talking about this vision my mom was having. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t about people now.”

How could I make it clear? What fitting analogy existed for a white girl, and then to top it off, her kind of white girl? I came up emptyhanded. That in itself was its own point. But I decided to let it drop, having hit a wall.

She told me she was going to head down to the river later that day to look at some boats that had recently landed. She was going on about some travelers she knew who were sailing garbage-art ships around the country via rivers and canals.

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absurdity, if I could make this partnership sustainable in any way and break through my own embarrassment, wondering if she would ever change or understand the issues I had with her, I barely noticed that as I was doing this, she was actively aligning her heart against me. As she watched me shifting in my chair, sizing her up, she was seeing through me, clearly as she always did, sensing my every thought, and deciding she wanted nothing more to do with it, nothing more to do with reaching and not knowing if I would be there for her to grasp. In that seemingly meaningless hour, her love for me barricaded itself against my fear and endless judgments and she became once more the mistress of her own fortress.

As I lay the payment on the table, she placed her small hand over mine. How soft her cheeks became tinged with sorrow and regret.

“Idrissa, I love you hunn. But what are you worrying about?”

“I’m not worrying about anything,” I lied.

She patted my hand twice. “You know what I feel for you, but you’re worrying, it’s got way under my skin. I can’t abide this feeling of being watched all the time. It gives me the chiggers, Idrissa.”

“The what?”

“I’m sorry you lost your fight today.”

“Yes, well.” I picked up her hand and kissed it. “Sometimes when you lose one thing, you win another.”

Her eyes pinched together and seemed to grow wet, although at the time I wasn’t sure. I still wasn’t comprehending what was happening. We stood. She took my face in her hands and kissed my cheek. I told her I would see her after work. She nodded yes.

I’ve heard someone say we never quite know the moment love begins, but looking back, we always know when it ends. As I stepped into my house that night, I recall the smell of poison, the loathsome smell of lonesomeness filling the air. It must have been there before she came, I had just grown accustomed to it. Those months, she imbued my home with so many scents: the female musk, incense, burning food, perfumes, and the soft aromas of 404

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makeup mixed with her grit and mildew. It was alive, the air when she lived in it. The air around her was alive. The moment she left, all the life left with her, and that noxious poisoned air I always resided in returned immediately. It would have been better if I had never known the difference, I thought. I went from room to room. All of her things were gone. Her key had been left on the table. There was no note. The shock of it sucked my breath. I sat down on the floor, alone again finally in my corner. I did not cry, not once.

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track six

Moon Over Bourbon Street

for two weeks , I muddled my way through my life, ghostlike, silent and empty. In the streets, I thought I saw her, but it never was. Those unkempt travelers, especially the ones in black, the waifs and street urchins bearing bags and stripes and patches, from the distance seemed to hold her perfect sway. But when I approached and they whipped their disheveled manes around, I was inevitably met with a reproachful countenance, the weary girls’ blue eyes turning distrustfully upon me, the lips that did not glitter, the cheeks that were not porcelain, the glance that did not answer yes immediately to everything. In their faces, I saw what they were not, and the memory of what she was became ever more painful. I should have known where she was all along. She’d told me. But I wasn’t listening when she said it. the beginning of the third week without her, I was shocked out

of my lethargic haze by an equally blinding brilliance. Mardi Gras had arrived. Typically, I would have been prepared, I would have seen it coming miles away. But I had been so distracted by my loss, I wasn’t looking up, and all at once it fell on my head. I stepped out of my apartment one day and was harshly reminded of where it was I was living and what this city lived for.

Vengeance. Vengeance is mine says the Lord? If that is true, it is only because New Orleans loans it out the rest of the year.

The entire city had got drunk. Beads had grown overnight from 406

trees. As I made my way to work, spinning, masked faces greeted me with their cackles. A man vomiting in the street filled the gutter with his wretchedness. I pushed my way past big white boys carrying fistfuls of hotdogs, singing slurred songs through their incandescent grins. Even in the morning light, women’s bosoms readied themselves for baring, like flags, emblematic of this barbaric nation I have planted myself in, where the fruit of life may be calculated at equal value to the shining, mass-produced replicas of indulgence as its own end.

Several fliers were pasted up on the brick wall of my office building. I glanced at them momentarily. Still reeling from the obstacles I’d crossed, an image of a strange boat caught my eye. I tore it from its pasted place and inspected it. Darkr Prospects, it read, Sponsors of the Cross-Country Journeys of the Mizz Halloway Fleet. This poorly photocopied image portrayed a gothic-style, makeshift sea craft, strewn together from bits of recyclables, garbage, and “found objects” as the flier stated.

Recognition bloomed in me. I recalled her words: “I’m gonna go check out these traveling queers landed around here. I know one, from that circus I was in. They fashioned theirselves some boat outta junk they found. Looks like a Willy Wonka tugger kinda thing. They’ll be heading out soon.”

I folded the flier in my pocket and turned directly around. The trolley wouldn’t take me quite to the canal but near enough.

I have heard it said, “The measure of love is loss.” It must be true, because I’d spent those past months dreading the thought of loving her, wondering if I ever could, and even if I could love her, wondering if I could bear the implications of that love. All those questions swirled around me when she was there for the taking, just inches away, giving herself as openly and freely as anything could be given. Only now that she was gone from me did I know more clearly than I have known most things in life that I wanted and needed her desperately, whatever the concession. We are all idiots.

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and the people a blur in my mind, and many of them, obviously inebriated, a blur in their own minds as well. The trolley let me off on a fairly empty street. The celebration was not so present here.

I made my way down to the dam. Unmanned sailboats swayed on the unstill water. There was no dock number on the flier, no address. It simply named the canal. I wondered if her type of people had some secret homing devices, or were there covert markers I wasn’t noticing strategically placed? Probably they just wandered until they magically found their position. I walked slowly along the dock, straining my eyes for some hint of recognition. But there was no need. It was not a subtle or easily missed sight.

Toward the turn of the pier, I quickly spotted, waving twenty feet high, a black pirate flag, skull and bones, the whole works, unfurled above a large tapestry of what appeared to be a halfsquid, half-human creature painted in a forward-bending modern dance pose. I hastened my steps. Three boats like three absurdities sat among the other small, shining, white sea crafts. They looked incredible, as if they’d been cut from a children’s book, grown three dimensions, and placed into our reality. One a was a large, black steamer with a spinning wheel and charcoal-colored chimney pipe billowing up toward the blue sky. This was, I supposed, the “WillyWonka-Tugger-kinda-thing” she’d referred to. Another looked more like a raft with a decadent hanging canopy of torn multicolored canvases, giving it the look of a beautiful woman fallen from society’s graces. And then there was the largest, appearing as an elfin cabin rising from the water, which was built up as a mosaic of junk and kitsch objects, mirrors, clocks, Romanesque statues, rubber tires, plywood boxes, and boards.

Within a few yards of the site, I could see that the fleet’s crew had extended itself out onto the land. Twenty or so makeshift structures and tents sprawled out on the dock and earth around it, a little tent city where strange-looking people bustled and lingered.

The first one I met was a shirtless, white man with a blue beard tattooed on his chin and several pieces of metal stuck through his 408

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eyebrows. As I stepped into their area, he approached me. “Hello, can I help you with something?” he asked. I stared at him, mouth agape, in the way he must have been used to.

“I’m looking for . . .” I said her name. “Do you know her?”

He stared back at me with an expression similar to the one I was giving him. “That’s a name?”

“Yes. Well, she also goes by Mya.” “There’s Mia. Is that who you mean?”

“Short, black hair, probably wearing a tutu?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess you can take a look around.” Blue-Beard extended his arm, motioning for me to pass.

Toward the center of their tent city was a large fire with a pot hanging over it, suspended by four sticks. Beside that sat a more modern grill. About ten people stood around it, cooking and talking. A goat was tied to a post nearby. It wore an elf ’s cap and a collar, so I assumed it was someone’s pet and not dinner. I approached the chef and inquired about my prospect. A cigarette stuck to her bottom lip as she flipped corncobs. She told me that a girl who fit the description of the one I was looking for had been hanging around and she thought she was in “Holly’s tent,” to which she pointed.

It was about six down on the left, a red one. One of the few other black men there, who fashioned what I believe is called a Liberty Spike, eyed me pointedly as I thanked her and made my way on. I was horribly out of place. These were others like her, unashamed of themselves. I worried she would be even more emboldened and refuse any interaction with me outright, even if I did find her.

My heart stopped beating before I reached it. I could already hear her laughter booming three lots away. It was a small, red camper’s tent that couldn’t have held more than two people. I made out rustling sounds from inside. There was no way to knock, so I scratched at the canvas door and called her name. “What was that?” another woman’s voice came from inside.

“It’s me,” I heard myself say.

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tattooed below her left eye poked her head out. “Who’s there?

What’s the password?” she asked playfully, shooting me an indistinguishable but seemingly jovial gaze below a mess of blonde dreadlocks. The tent unzipped the rest of the way and the face of my love blossomed beside her. She had, I noticed, red lipstick smeared from her lips down to the bottom of her chin. There was something particularly blushing and swollen about her, and I felt suddenly the chiming of a particular atrocity of mind so skillfully recited by a certain Humbert of Humberts, like an aria playing on my bones. Although her apple-faced girl was certainly no comparison to Claire Quilty, Mya noticed what I was looking at, disappeared then reemerged full body, having wiped her face clean.

“Fancy meeting you here.” She tapped her boot on the ground and stared at me, hands on her hips, in anticipation. The other girl watched us from inside the tent. I hadn’t thought it through at all.

Now that I was there, I had no idea what to do or say next. I simply nodded. “Cat got your tongue?” she asked, “Or has it been a while since you had your tongue stuck in a cat?” She said this coldly, but there was something cruelly tender about her remembrance. Or maybe it was only tender in me. I nearly crumbled in front of her and her weird companion.

My jaw trembled. I looked to the ground. “You didn’t even leave a note.”

“Why, so you could correct the grammar?” She was angry with me. She was watching me, I realized, as if I might attack, though I had come to beg. There was no fight left in me.

“Please, can we talk?”

“Sure, what about?” She clicked her tongue at me and grinned maliciously.

I sighed. “Somewhere else. Let me buy you a meal.”

She patted her stomach. “Naw, these fools are keeping me full of lentils. I’m stuffed.”

“A drink then?”

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“Where?” She looked around to the docks, at the grass patches and the empty road.

“We’ll walk somewhere. One drink?”

She nodded and turned to her friend, who was dressing herself inside the opening. “Hey Holly, this nice lady’s gonna buy me a drink. Finally pay me back for finding her wallet, I guess.”

Holly giggled and scrunched her nose to wrinkles. “Okay. Don’t disappear. We sail out tomorrow.” Mya leaned down to her. The girl grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and pulled her closer. “I’ll need you to scrub my decks.” Then she kissed her, hard and wet, before releasing her.

We walked through the last few yards of their tent city in silence.

Her lips held themselves together pensively. Three seagulls circled overhead.

“Is she your lover?” I asked, hiding the quiver that was blooming in my throat.

She shook her head. “Whatdya mean?” We turned onto the road.

“Your girlfriend. Is that your girlfriend?”

She groaned and kicked a can against the curb. “Aw, come on man, it’s Mardi Grass.” She pronounced the silent s and gave it a rough a.

“Oh.” A breeze caught my neck. I pulled my jacket collar up and shivered.

“Still chilly, aint it?”

“What did she mean, you sail out tomorrow?”

“We do. We sail out, that’s all. They’ve been all up and down the Mississippi in those things, performing shows on the boats for little towns along the river. I’m gonna go with them and do my juggling and fire stuff.”

“When are you coming back?”

She turned her slanting eyes up to me. “Coming back where?

Here?” She sucked her tongue as she let her eyes scan the clear blue sky. “Who knows? I’m landing off in New York eventually.

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I’ve had enough small time. Wanna try out the big one, see how it fits.”

“They’re sailing to New York? That’s impossible. In those things? You’ll die.”

“Why do you always have to do that?”

“Do what?”

“Turn everything down. Say no to everything. You worry too much to live.” She shook her head and mumbled to herself. We turned a corner, passing three gutted houses in a row.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t know how that’s possible.”

“Well, it is. They’re moving off to the Hudson next, but I’m leaving em in the city. I got a plan this time. I’m ready for something new. It’s even got new in the name.”

She was serious. Her casual and matter-of-fact manner confused me. Had she gone off the deep end, or was this a sign of maturation?

“There’s a place.” I pointed to what appeared to be a small pub at the end of the street.

The bar was dimly lit. The only patron other than the two of us was a man in a trucker cap who sat hunched in the corner nursing his beer. We seated ourselves at the bar. “What do you want?” I asked her, pulling out my wallet.

“I can get anything?

“Anything.”

“Well, I guess it’s early, so I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

“Make that two.” A bleached blonde girl with five pounds of beads ornamenting her neck whipped us up two liquid salads in pint-sized glasses and slid them over. She tried sucking the cocktail through the large celery stick. Most of it dribbled down her chin.

“So, that’s it? You’re just going to leave? Just like that?” My girl pawed the juice from her chin, then licked it off the top of her hand, like a cat, staring blankly up at me. “What about me? You’re completely done? What about Hitler? I thought you said she was a thing you had to be keeping.”

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She sucked another gulp down then spun herself in circles on the stool. On the third turn, I grabbed her by the elbow, stopping her. She gave me a piercing glare. “What do you care? I thought you didn’t even believe in her.”

“I don’t.”

“Ha.What about you? Whatdya mean what about you?”

“I don’t understand why you’re being so belligerent with me. I thought we were making up.”

Her face softened. Readjusting herself in the stool, she tucked her leg under for height and hunched her shoulders. “You still want to be with me?” My look must have been pitiful, because she gave me a pitying pout. “Idrissa, you were right, we don’t make any sense together, hunn. That good old feeling was going and I didn’t want to stick around until it was all the way gone and there wasn’t nothing left but badness. I love you a lot, and I probably always will. But you know, just cause the raft gets you across the ocean, that don’t mean you gotta carry it across the desert, too.

That’s how I’m thinking about us, and how I’m thinking about Aryan now. Some things I gotta just let go of and find new ways to go on. You gotta cut some things offa yerself sometimes, painful as it might be.”

This angered me. “Oh that’s a fine philosophy. Is that what your father did, just let everything go when he was done with it?”

“No. Now hush up there. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe your mother then. Is that what she did? That’s no way to live your life, just sailing around from moment to moment, not taking any responsibility for the things you’ve tamed, the things you own.” This was obviously hitting a wound. She was exposed before me, her cheeks reddening, her eyes full of question and fear.

“Some things are yours whether you like it or not, because you made them yours,” I told her proudly full of courage.

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thrown out. And that does seem about right, anyway. All I’ve been is thrown out, so I might as well just go on a blow around.”

My head felt very heavy. I took a drink, then slid the glass away and rested my face in my hands. “I’m sorry. I should never have said that. I didn’t mean that.”

“Yeah, you did.” She spoke softly, patting my back.

“No, I didn’t. God, I’ve lost everything.” I told this small truth to the bar. “I lost the campaign. I lost you. Everything I’ve done this year has been a failure. I’m the trash, not you. I wasn’t smart enough to help those people and I wasn’t brave enough to love you.”

She shook my shoulder. “Aw, come on now. Chin up. Life’s still going. You still going on about that building? There’s more than one way to skin a cat, you know?”

I hung my head down in self pity. “Come on, Drissi. I still love you, hunn. If you think about it though, yer probably a lot better off without me.”

She pushed my drink at me. I nursed it like a bottle, and became blubbery. “I’m not. I’m not,” I whispered, shaking my weary head.

Funny how love can make even the coldest and sternest of us infants again. “You don’t know how it’s been these weeks feeling so alone, not knowing where you were, if you were safe, if you were ever coming back. You don’t know. You can’t do that to people, just disappear. It’s cruel.”

She flinched at my statement, and a thought seemed to occur to her. “Hey,” she poked my back, mostly ignoring pathetic lamentations. “Hey, do you have a phone?”

“What?”

“A cell phone? You got one on you?” I nodded. “Can I use it for a sec? I need to make a call.”

A call? Right now?”

“Yeah. But I need to call the information operator first. That costs extra. Is it all right?”

“Okay.” I blinked myself back to reality, dug around in my bag and handed her my phone.

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“I’ll just be a sec.” She hopped off the barstool, took my phone and went out the door.

I’d finished my drink by the time she returned. She gave me my phone back and thanked me. I asked if she wanted a second round, but she declined, telling me that she had a lot to finish up over the next two days. She departed rather briskly and coldly, promising to write from the Big Apple, as she put it, and assuring me of the sorts of banal things people assure those they are leaving, that I would always hold a special place in her love, that I would see her again someday, that there was nothing she wouldn’t do for me, except, of course, stay. She also assured me that I would be fine, and that the “building thing” would pan out. I wasn’t convinced of any of it. I’d experienced the pain of a heart mangled by romance only once before, so found myself completely lacking any idea how to approach the awful feelings swirling in my gut. I offered to walk her back but she rejected that as well. So she left me, sitting alone in that dark, empty bar, feeling shamed and torn between struggle and acceptance, drinking myself into a peppery stupor. I sat there thinking of how much harder, how much colder she’d grown, and feeling guilty with the knowledge that this was, more than partly, my doing. I knew she still loved me. She was injured. She was afraid. She’s accepted worthlessness and given up on trying to keep anything. But I’d made her feel worthless.

On my third drink, I decided to redial the numbers she’d called.

There were two, each from two other states. I was startled when the first number connected me to a gruff man proclaiming, “Missouri State Penitentiary. How can I help ya?” I hung up immediately, and gave it some thought, but decided finally to go on and dial the second number as well. This one led me to a very eccentric answering machine, which played some hard rock anthem then broke into another gruff male voice shouting, “You’ve reached Vietnaaaaaam!” followed by a loud beep. I didn’t leave a message.

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sometime just after sunset, I stumbled out and headed for the heart of hell. Bourbon street, Monday night, just hours before fat Tuesday. They were preparing for the apocalypse. The whole neighborhood was dressed up like a two-dollar whore spreading her matronly arms wide, revealing an ample bare bosom no doubt awaiting Satan’s children to enter her folds. Those folds were just what I needed to cradle my overwhelming ache. The only person I had allowed to know me was leaving forever and there was nothing I could do about it. So I tossed myself into the pit of neon hurricanes hoping it would swallow me unconscious until I could bear myself again.

I pushed slowly through the crowd, which was nearly shoulderto-shoulder with revelers. In past years, I took great efforts to avoid going anywhere near this area during the Easter season. The population of the city must have tripled in two days. Everyone comes to New Orleans for their once-in-a-lifetime experience. The workers on Bourbon Street shoulder the burden of delivering those oncein-a-lifetime experiences daily.

Scantily dressed women posing as amazons or kittens (take your pick) stood on platforms before the line of gentleman’s clubs, ringed by suited bouncers who held back the wavering crowd.

Beyond them, two Uncle Sams, one painted silver, one gold, stood chest to chest, in the middle of what appeared to be an increasingly volatile argument, obviously over which one of the costumed men had claim to performing on that particular corner, and would no doubt soon erupt into violence. From the distance, a marching jazz band blared continuously over the cacophony of boom boxes, music pouring out from the dance halls and the screeching voices of the street crowd. I made my way onto a side road. The crowd was still thick, but I found room to move. Stepping through a group of local teenagers who stood rapping around a break-dance circle near the curb, I ducked into the Erin Rose.

This usually dim, drafty Irish pub was filled wall to brick with all sorts of young, imported costumed drunks mixed with some of

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the pub’s usual crowd, middle-aged men in ball caps and scruffy beards accompanied occasionally by frumpy female counterparts.

I forced myself near enough to the bar to shout out for a whiskey soda. The matron passed it to me overhead. As I held it in the air, a masked white girl jostled me heavily, and the top half of my drink spilled down my arm.

“Hey there,” she shouted with a thick Southern drawl, swinging her arm around my neck and hanging on me. “Happy Mardi Gras.

Cheers.” She clinked her glass against mine. I took a large gulp of what was left. “You don’t got any beads, hunny?” Her breath smelled of bourbon and fruit. Her mask sparkled with green and pink glitter.

I found her, as with most of the female portion of the crowd, to be quite underdressed for the weather. She pinched my nose and smiled at me, taking another drink from her large neon cup. “Guess I can’t show you my tits if you don’t have any beads!” She swayed as she hung on me. I found myself partly holding her up. “Maybe you can show me yours and I can give you some of mine.”

“What?”

“You’re cute,” she shouted over the commotion, pinching my nose again. More people were entering and I was forced to scoot both her and myself two steps forward. As I moved us, I felt her hand rubbing my hip, moving toward my crotch. “Is it true what they say about you guys?” I struggled against her reaching. She let out a cackling laugh. I stared down into her dumb, glazed blue eyes, watery inside the sparkling eyeholes of her mask. Her long brown hair had tangled at the shoulders. “What’s the matter?” she asked. I shook my head.

Over the music and conversation came two ear-piercing squeals as two other similarly outfitted girls materialized beside her.

“Claire! Claire!” They shouted.

“Who did you find?” the blonde one asked, taking her by the arm that wasn’t holding on to me.

“Isn’t he cute?” apparently Claire asked them, pouting her lips out and slurring her words. “I wunnim. I wunt him.”

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“Come on,” the other brunette hollered. “Zack finally got a table in the back.”

“You need to sit down and drink some water.” They tugged on her, but she held tight to me. “He can come too. Come on, dude,” the friend ordered. I was escorted by the three young women through the chaos of the dance floor and into a chair at a table in the crowded back corner. Claire plopped down on my lap. The two women scooted in next to us. Across from them sat two pinkcheeked young men in collared shirts, all members of the group, strung up with pounds of beads.

“Who the fuck is he?” one of the boys asked, incredulously.

“Leave him alone, Zack,” Claire shouted, smacking at him over the table, then swinging her arm over my shoulder. She rubbed her nose against mine and played with the collar of my shirt, continuing in a mock baby voice. “I wunt him. This wuns mine.”

The men shrugged at each other. “What’s your name?” the blonde asked, yelling over the din.

I pulled away from Claire’s Eskimo kisses. She leaned sideways onto the table as the one boy who was not Zack force-fed her water through a straw. “Idrissa,” I answered.

“What?”

I repeated it.

“What kind of name is that?”

“It’s African.”

“Oh wow.” Zack and the two girls eyed me curiously.

“I’ve lived here for years, though,” I told them, attempting to take another drink while Claire wiggled on my knee.

“Well, I’m Anna, and this is Barb.”

“You can call me Barbie.” The women all spoke with the same slow drawl. “We’re in for Mardi Gras. We go to Georgia Tech together. We’re juniors, so you don’t have to worry. She’s legal.”

The two girls giggled.

“He didn’t look worried, Barb,” Zack told her harshly. He stood and leaned over the table. “We need more booze.”

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“Calm down, grumpy!” Barb reached into her purse and produced a bottle of vodka. “I got you covered.” She filled their cups under the table, also directing me to refresh mine. Claire held a cup out to her, but Barb told her to take it easy for a while.

“Why y’all being so mean to me?” Claire hollered. “I might as well have brought the ’rents.” She pivoted on my lap, swinging one leg around, straddling me. “You’re not my daddy though, are you?” Her nose touched mine again and I felt her hand making its way for my drink. I released it to her. I had no claim on her sobriety. The whole world could go to hell tonight as far as I cared.

Claire sipped a lethal gulp through the straw then immediately forced her pickled tongue into my mouth, sucking at my face with inebriated desperation. It was not an unpleasant sensation. When she released me, I slipped the lopsided, sparkling mask from her eyes, letting it rest on the top of her head.

She was a very beautiful young woman, pale and white. Her cheeks still bedded the rose blossoms of youth, pink, naturally occuring blushes as if dabbed on with soft powder. Although she was thin, and her face long and ovular, she was soft all about, not having completely relinquished her rights to a bit of child fat, which gave her the feel of something fragile and innocent, even as she dared me to debauch her. The other girls were frumpier, more sturdy and heavily made up. These boys must have thought this little darling on my lap a perfect vixen, but I knew firsthand the master of vixenry, and was only lightly impressed by the affections of one of her fairy minions.

My admiring was interrupted by Zack, who now stood from his chair, looking disapprovingly down at us. “Are you just going to let her do this, Barb?”

“Leave me the fuck alone!” Claire squealed, not turning her head, but yelling almost directly into my ear.

“Fine, you wanna get her fucked up, you hold her head when she’s puking, dude,” he told me.

Barb stood up, cocking her head at Zack. “Why do you care who she’s making out with, huh?”

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“It’s not about that, okay Barbie.”

“You need to start paying attention to what you’re supposed to be paying attention to.” Barbie came back, her face flushing. I assumed she was referring to herself as what he was supposed to be paying attention to.

“This doesn’t bother you at all?” Zack motioned to me. I knew what this was. My color was an excuse to mask his obvious jealousy and cloak his territorial inclinations in legitimate concern.

“You know what? It’s Mardi Gras. I’m not letting your dumb ass ruin it.” Barb shouted at him, slinging her bag over her shoulder and turning as if to leave. “You care so much what she’s doing?

You can keep your head up Claire’s ass all night if you want. Have fun. I’m going to go find something else to do. Maybe someone else. Maybe you don’t care about that.” She stormed off into the dance floor.

“Barbie, no. Come on, don’t fucking do this.” Zack followed after her, shouting Barbie no, a profound petition absorbed by the atrocious binary ball into which they disappeared.

“Don’t worry about them. They’re always fighting like that,” Anna told me. “Took the goddamned whiskey though.” She eyed the other boy who still sat across from her, looking generally vapid.

He shrugged. Anna scooted over next to him, took his doughy head in her hands and kissed him.

“I’m the fifth wheel,” Claire told me smiling, turning me by the chin back to her wet gaze. Her pink lips quivered. She bit the bottom one. “We don’t need liquor anyway. I have something better.”

Pressing her finger to the dent above her mouth, she whispered that she had a secret. I nodded. “You wanna share my secret?” I nodded again. She raised her eyebrow into a sharp point. “Oh, I like you. The silent type, huh?”

“I suppose.”

In her palm rested two white pills with four leaf clovers printed on their faces. I did not ask what they were before we washed them down with the last of my drink. “Happy skinny Monday.”

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She pressed herself against me and I let everything get lost in the warmth of that affectionate stranger.

I don’t know how much time passed, but I found myself spiraling, falling back into myself from a somewhere above I did not remember flying to. I opened my eyes and held her away. “It’s hitting,” she told me. I’d never taken a hard drug before. It was shocking to find how apt that phrase was, “it’s hitting.” Where an hour before there was only emptiness from the spill of a broken heart and all my losses, only numbness, now the whole of existence was surging through me, hitting against every atom in my body. The base of the music, the voices, the lights, which suddenly flashed in violet spasms, were what made me up instead of my blood and flesh. My teeth rattled and clinked in my mouth. Claire caressed my hands. Her skin against mine felt magnetic, warm, soft, and irresistible. “Let’s do something.”

“Aren’t we already doing something?”

“No! We’re just sitting here,” she giggled, and stood, pulling me up. She was right, I soon discovered. Sitting below her gyrating body had required much less effort than making my way, in that state, into the Dionysian crowd flaunting their heat and weight all around me.

“You want to stay here, or you want to go somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else.”

The street was a mob scene. The ground was littered with tinsel, beads, and plastic cups at every step. Claire pulled me along, but things seemed to spin and bounce around me. Walking was difficult because it was hard to know exactly which way was forward. The deep booms and high squeals of a brass band blared on my ears as people erupted in dancing and a skeleton puppet gnashed its ominous cackling teeth in my face, setting me hopping in a bad direction. I knocked into an oversized Rastafarian man, his face painted bright blue. He leaned down and touched his nose to mine, wiggling his puffy brows. “Love what you destroy. Destroy the things that you love,” he shouted, then threw his locks back and wailed at the moon like a banshee.

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“Don’t get separated!” Claire smacked me on the shoulder and took my hand again, leading me away. “Where should we go? You know this city, right? You live here?”

I nodded. “But I don’t spend time on Bourbon Street,” I said, straining over the noise. My teeth chattered. I found that my mouth was dry and I was deathly thirsty.

She pulled me several blocks up the street into a crowded club pulsing electronic music and neon lasers through an expansive dance floor. “Come on, let’s dance!” Claire hopped excitedly beside me.

I shook my head no and licked my lips. “I need water.”

“Good idea.” After a bit of a wait, we were able to purchase two bottles of water, which we drank greedily quick. Claire took the last bit of the water and dumped it over her hair then shook her head violently, so that the droplets flew out, in what seemed to be slow motion, breaking against the laser beams. “Now we dance.”

“No. I don’t dance.”

“Don’t be a retard.” She took me by the hands and bounced.

“You have to dance.”

Never in my adulthood have I found myself having to dance. But the moment I hit the dance floor, feeling the pulsing of the other people and vibrations of the base, the urge became imperative. I had to dance. Claire pushed at me and started laughing, shaking her head. “You look funny.”

I smiled back and laughed at myself. Everything seemed to make me so happy, even her making fun of me. She was right, I was sure I did look funny. I was still wearing sneakers and my brown corduroys, which now felt heavy, itchy, and abrasive against my skin. Not at all proper attire for a nightclub. But I didn’t care. As the lights flashed and my body also flashed hot, I found myself moving, sweating, evaporating, and reforming a hundred times a second inside the sound of electricity, which I felt had begun to make me up.

Hours passed like that trapped in the space of pure sensation, a space beyond all recollection.

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Claire’s face materialized before me through the flashing and darkness. “It’s late. I mean, it’s early.” I reached out and pawed at her cheek. “You want to come back with me, to my room?”

I nodded. Not only was I no longer thinking clearly, I was no longer thinking at all. I simply moved on command, following her at halting paces back to her hotel. She searched around her small bag for her key to no avail as we waited in the elevator, but it was needless. The door to her room was open, as were the doors of at least three other rooms on that floor, and the parties were spilling out into the hallway.

Zack’s familiar face appeared immediately. “What the fuck? I thought he killed you maybe.” Zack had made what these kids call “a b-line” for us as soon as we entered the fray.

“What the fuck? I thought this was my room maybe,” Claire came back.

“What, this?” He looked around himself to the small group that crowded in the single bed suite. “Yeah, we opened the doors connecting the rooms so we could have a real party. Don’t get your panties wadded.”

“It’s five in the morning.”

“It’s Mardi Gras!” Zack held a beer over his head as if in cheers.

“Where’s Barbie? You better leave me alone, you know. She’s going to cut your dick off.” Claire tugged on the collar of Zack’s shirt and threw her head back laughing, revealing the thin, soft flesh of her long neck I suddenly wanted to be biting. Out of character, I stepped up and took her by the waist, pulling her away from her lovelorn frat boy. We stepped over two empty bottles of peach schnapps, and seemed to be heading toward the bathroom. Two couples sat on the bed, smoking and kissing while three very drunk women attempted to dance near the window to what sounded like the latest top forty hit. I was the only person in the room who was not very young and very white.

Claire locked the bathroom door behind us and pressed me into the wall. “Have you ever done it on Ex?” I shook my head no. “It’s the ultimate thing.”

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“Oh?” “It’s not wearing off, is it?” She reached up under my shirt and scratched at my back, moving her body against mine. I took her by the chin and kissed her swollen little pink lips, hard. I felt something snap at my back. “What’s that?”

I pushed her hand down, away from it. “A back brace,” I told her, pawing at her chest. The thought occurred to me that this was enough. The sensation was still so intense, I didn’t need any more than this heavy petting. That thought, of course, was a protective inclination, and completely misguided. I should have turned and left right then, but instead I squeezed her ass up under her skirt and bit at her neck. Her fingers tugged at my belt, undoing the buckle, and she unbuttoned my pants. I reached down and stopped her hand, then flipped us around, pressing her back to the wall.

“What’s the matter?” she asked through her soft groaning. I continued at her neck and collarbone with my mouth, holding her hands back over her head. “Are you playing hard to get? That’s my job.” She laughed and swung one leg up around me, pulling me harder into her. Within a few minutes, I was lost again, off my guard in the thoughtlessness of our coupling.

I’m sure it was due to the effect of the drug, but I was not aware of having taken it too far when my hand slipped into her panties, fingering her small, shaved folds of flesh and her hands went where they had been trying to go for a while.

That scream split my head like a heartache that rings eternally against my ribs. It was followed by a second, manic, hiccupping squeal. We let go of each other. I stepped away from her. “Shhh,” I hissed, motioning for her to be quiet.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” she shouted, holding her hands up by her face, her cheeks red, her eyes wide and confused, staring down at me. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked loudly, violently, her voice quivering. I rebuttoned my pants.

There was a pounding at the door and a young man hollered for us to unlock it. “What’s going on in there? Are you okay?”

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Claire looked from me to the door, but did not move. “Hey, open up.” More voices came from the other side followed by continuous knocking. Claire stood stiff against the wall. The handle shook. I reached out and flipped the latch. The door swung open. Three boys rushed in, many others crowding at the door. Zack cornered me. “What’s going on?” he asked, cocking his head and puffing his chest aggressively toward me. I stiffened against the wall and swallowed hard. Barbie pushed her way in and grabbed Claire, who was cowering sideways against the other wall. “Did he hurt you?”

Zack asked, not taking his eyes off of me.

“What did he do?” Barbie asked, taking Claire by the shoulders gingerly in her hands. “Should we call the police?” Claire eyed me sideways, then shook her head no.

“No, no, he didn’t do anything.”

“Why were you screaming then?” another boy asked. “Do we need to take care of some business?” He balled his fists at his sides and eyed me aggressively. More people were peeking in through the door around the three young men who were cornering me.

“Hey man, why don’t you say anything?” Zack shoved my shoulder. “What did you do to her?”

“Leave him alone,” Claire hollered. “He didn’t do anything,” she said more quietly, her voice quivering as if about to break into crying, as she bit her thumb and turned her face away.

“Tell me,” Barbie whispered, turning her chin back and leaning in close. “You can tell me. Whisper it.” Claire shook her head, her eyes wide, dilated and confused.

She was only two feet away from me, so I was able to make it out as I watched her whisper lowly to Barbie, “I don’t know, it just . . .” Her eyes met mine for a moment. “It’s not . . . normal.”

She covered her face. Barbie pulled her hands back down.

“What? What’s not normal?”

She eyed Barbie sharply, “You know, it,” she whispered. Her hissing whispers sounded like a vicious serpent.

“It? It, it?” Barbie asked.

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Claire nodded meaningfully. A smirk rose on Barbie’s lips and she rolled her eyes. “Oh God, Claire. Seriously?”

Claire looked quickly from me then to Zack, before turning back to the wall, covering her face.

“What? What’d she say?” Zack asked.

Barbie shook her head and let out an exasperated sigh. “Just let him go, okay.”

Zack eyed his girlfriend then turned to me and leaned in, placing his hand against the wall, continuing to block my way to the door. “I don’t think so. You better tell me what’s up, or someone’s about to get busted.” He bit his bottom lip, and faked a lunge at me. “We treat ladies with respect, on my watch.” He pounded the wall by my head. “I don’t know what you do in Africa . . .”

“Oh for God’s sake.” Barbie pulled on his shoulder, cupped her hand over his ear and whispered into it. A smile also slowly bloomed on Zack’s lips. He shook his head and let out a few scoffing laughs.

“What, what happened, man?” the other boy asked.

Zack looked me up and down, smirking evilly. “Fucking hell.”

He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. He removed his hand from the wall and stood back. “I guess she just saw a snake.” The two young men, obviously somewhat drunk, covered their mouths and burst into laughter. “I guess she wasn’t ready for it. Her eyes were bigger than her . . . stomach.” Everyone let out cackling. Claire shook her head and hit her face. “Let him go.” Zack tapped on the shoulders of the boys at the door. “He didn’t do anything, I guess.”

They stepped aside, laughing and spilling beer.

I pushed through them quickly, giving one last glance toward Claire, who looked at me with shame and disgust in her eyes. I heard Zack saying, through more inebriated laughter, “Careful what you wish for Claire, hunny. You just might get it.”

Another shouted out, “If it were a snake, it would have bit ya!”

“Not normal! It’s not normal.” Zack mimicked her. “What did you expect?”

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More hilarity broke out. As I stepped through the door to the hallway, another young man asked in mocking tones, “What kind of snake was it? Was it a python or an anaconda?!?” followed by an imitation of Claire’s squealing, “Eeeek!”

I walked briskly down the hallway, trying to push their horrible grinning faces out of my mind, and went through the fire exit, not wanting to wait for the elevator, jogging down the stairs two at a time.

The sun had risen. It was already notably warmer than the previous day. Crowds were forming along the street in preparation for the Zulu Parade. A large black woman in a grass skirt pouted her large white lips though her inked up face and shook her ample hips where she stood on a box on the curb, as revelers cheered at her feet.

I no longer felt myself a minority. Nearly every person gathered here was black, many of them even blacker than black, adorning shoeshine, blackened faces with white circles drawn around their lips and eyes. I had to blink and wonder for a moment if I wasn’t hallucinating, before I recalled this odd tradition which is still allowed without much guffaw, if only for a few hours, one day a year. A trumpet sounded too loudly near my ear, and I scurried off.

My body felt as if it might crumble away. My head was floating in the dazed aftermath of my decadence. I needed something warm to drink. St. Charles was littered with small fast food diners and cafés. I stepped into one and ordered a coffee, which was served to me in a flimsy paper cup. Taking a stool at the window, I hunched down over the steaming liquid, and I think I actually fell asleep for a few minutes, but was jostled awake by a clumsy man at the end of the line which now extended nearly out the door.

I sat there for over an hour, gulping down almost three cups of coffee and trying to remember how to think again. Outside the window, the parade crowd had amassed shoulder to shoulder. Now and then, floats made their way past, heading to the lineup at the beginning of the route. I felt like passing out, but figured I had made it this far and might as well stay for the parade. I went to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face and took myself into Track Six: Moon Over Bourbon Street

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account. My eyes were red maps of disillusion nested inside two heaving bags of flesh. What had I done? How cliché. I acted the typical part of the immature lovesick man, drinking and drugging myself into a stupor and hopping on the first girl who grabbed me.

And now I was ashamed, physically destroyed, and psychologically tormented.

I edged my way as near the street as I could. Luckily, I did not have to bear the full weight of standing upright, as I was partially held up, pressed against on all sides by the gatherers. As the first float became visible, the crowd let up cheering and bouncing. My phone buzzed in my pocket. Dan was calling. I couldn’t answer, but I did note it strange that he was calling me so early, on a day when no one in this city except bartenders would be working.

A mass of gold and feathers, the Zulu King, followed by the Queen, waved as they passed on their high float. Their cronies handed golden coconuts to emphatic natives shouting and shoving one another for the chance at the coveted prizes. Several more floats passed before me in a blur as I was bumped side to side by the steady swaying of the throng. I kept my gaze to the clouds, even as the spectacle of bedazzlement raged all around. Standing a good seven rows back from the street, I could only make out the top half of things. My mind was elsewhere, off somewhere without me, perhaps catching up on the rest I’d denied it. The sky was the color of wilted pansies. The air smelled of trash and the breath of alcoholics. They cheered and blew horns and whistles, shook their noisemakers and howled like dogs into the air. It was becoming intolerable, and I was beginning to think about leaving, when a gradual hush made its way like a wave through the onlookers. The people in front of me got still, strained their necks to see.

A silent awwing took over. “Is it real?” I overheard a woman murmur. “How did they do that?” And then, the repeated whispers stung my ears, “Red.” “They’re red.”

“They sure are, aren’t they?’

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“It’s got red eyes.”

I nearly leapt forward, shoving several rows of people out of my way. I stumbled to the front, catching myself by hanging onto the shoulder of a small woman who yelped and pulled away. There it was, passing directly in front of me. I was face to face with impossibility, the white, red-eyed horse making its way at slow trot pulling behind it an emerald carriage. “Oh my God. Aryan,” fell from my mouth in whisper, just a split second before I found myself laid out hard on my ass.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” A large imposing man stared down at me, after having shoved me down in one easy move. He pointed to the woman standing beside him whom I had propped myself up on. “You grabbing women? Just shoving people around?”

His girlfriend folded her arms and cocked her head at me in anger. The impossible horse was disappearing down the route.

I scurried to my feet, apologizing under my breath, and pushed through the crowd, trying to keep up with her like a farewell lover following a diminishing train. It proved difficult, as every third person I shoved aside shouted and jeered at me. Finally, another man pushed me down on my ass and my increasingly bruised backside told me it would not be wise to continue in that vein. I got out of the throng and jogged down a less densely populated side street that ran parallel to the parade route, hoping to head them off at Canal Street. When I reached the corner, I found it even more difficult to get close enough to the front to see anything, and at the rate the floats were moving, it was hard to know if I’d come too soon or too late.

No matter. I knew she was real, and my girl was still here, at least for today. I could no doubt call the parade planners and find who owned the white horse with red eyes. I could get her back. I could redeem myself and her.

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was sailing out today, they had said. I hoped that didn’t mean the morning. There were no trolleys running in the French Quarter. I jogged until I found a street where traffic was moving and hailed a cab to the dam. The image of the white horse, however fleeting, burned in my mind. the shining , still water of the canal conducted itself with

hushed triumph. I stared at the little waves where those strange boats had been docked. There was nothing now, and nothing even in the distance to spot, no fading silhouettes, or even the illusion of some glimmering shadow I might call out to in vain. Small bits of trash and foodstuff outlined the area that had been their makeshift campsite. The water had her now.

The urge to cry grew straining in my throat, but I swallowed it back down. She was gone, simply, certainly, and I might as well accept it. What was I to do with her weird world anyway?

I lay down on the dirty grass and sighed at the sky. Under my head, I found a tattered pink ribbon, which I picked apart slowly, trying to think myself into a dignified person again, trying to think about tomorrow, about forgetting her and getting back to my life, the one I had known and lived without problem or incident for so long. It was a difficult journey quickly interrupted by my phone buzzing in my pocket. It was Dan, again. This time I answered.

“Yes, hello,” I said, surprised at the strained, grainy noise that had become my voice.

“Idrissa, where have you been?” I moaned in response. “Are you all right?”

I sat up, rubbed my eyes and coughed, clearing my throat. “I’m fine. What is it?”

“We have a . . . situation.”

“What situation?”

“The police called me this morning. I told them I didn’t know anything. They need to talk to you.”

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“About what?”

“It’s about the condo site, our project house. Someone burned it down.”

The earth seemed to wave in shifting motions with the water.

“What do you mean someone burned it down?”

“It’s gone, to a crisp. Half finished, and poof. They said they had reason to believe it was arson. They asked me if I’d ever purchased kerosene. It happened last night.”

“It’s Mardi Gras. Everything gets burned down at Mardi Gras.

It was probably just some kids having a party that got out of hand.”

I tried to sound steady but my voice was clearly agitated. “Why do they need to talk to us?”

Dan hesitated. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But this is a lot of money lost for the contractor, for the city, and our group has been the most vocal opponent of this project. So obviously, we’re suspected.”

“What do we need to do?”

“Just call the detective as soon as possible. He wants to talk to you.” There was a brief silence. He sighed audibly. “Tell them you don’t know anything about it. You don’t, do you?”

“Of course not.”

I’ll give you his number. You ready?”

“I don’t have a pen. I’m outside. Just email it to me. I’ll head home now.”

Dan hung up.

On the horizon, the clouds were parting, breaking into mist revealing the sunlight. I shook my head and imagined her standing in her tutu and boots, torch in hand amid the planks and rafters.

Ultimately, I knew it was an act of love. I understood this immediately and without question. This is how she showed her love.

What violence. What insanity. And yet, in one night she accomplished what I couldn’t after years of work. She hurt them where it mattered, in their pockets. Even if they did decide to rebuild, they would think twice about it, about what the people in this city Track Six: Moon Over Bourbon Street

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were capable of, what we would and would not allow them to get away with. But she didn’t do it for any of that, did she? No. She did it for me. She left me an ashen valentine before sailing away on her mythological caravan. For a moment I thought, she risked everything for me. Then I laughed it away, realizing she hadn’t actually risked much. She was untraceable. They wouldn’t catch her. How do you track someone without a name, without age or assets? How do you track sailboats of junk and gilded art gliding over the ocean? She might as well have never existed. She may as well not exist, except to me.

But to me, she was very real. She had hooked my heart and pulled out from it a passion I did not know I possessed. She was the only one I’d shown myself to fully, and the only one who accepted me kindly when she saw me. The feeling crept up in me there on that shore that I did not fully exist either, except to her. Even if she wouldn’t have me back, I needed to know that I had shown her at least as much love and bravery as she had shown me. She gave me what I was fighting for, in her own terrifying way. And I also would return to her the thing she had been seeking. At least I could do that. As wind slapped over the waters of the canal and splashed a hard wave up on the dock, I rose to my feet and walked toward a tomorrow that I knew would look nothing like my yesterdays.

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track seven

Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

there were five of them. Idrissa could not decipher the order

of their ages, but largest to smallest there was Vietnam, Brazil, Egypt, Chad, and Thailand. They met up with him at Wild Chuck’s steakhouse next to a truck stop off the freeway, just outside of Odessa, Texas.

It was seven pm. He recognized them immediately. As they filed into the restaurant, he momentarily resisted raising his arm and waving them over, but he realized it wouldn’t matter whether he did or not. There was no turning back. In a moment, they would see him and no doubt recognize him even if he remained motionless. He had described himself on the phone and he was the only black man in the establishment who was not a server.

Although he recognized them, because there were five of them, his imagination had not sculpted them as large and rough as they were, as he should have known they would be. My lover’s uncles, he thought as he watched them enter, could divide me up for dinner and still have room for dessert if they got the hankering. He gulped hard, raised his hand and waved.

The apparent leader of the pack introduced himself as Vietnam, the man he’d spoken with by phone. All but one of them shook his hand before seating themselves bangingly at the large, circular table. Brazil, the one who’d avoided a handshake, shouted out to the barista for a round of beers. “So, I guess you’re my niece’s boy?” Brazil said, taking a big chew of his wad of tobacco 433

then placing the gooey mush into a paper he crumpled and shoved into his back pants pocket.

Vietnam jabbed his brother with his elbow. “Now don’t you start off with that boy shit. She got herself a man now. At least she got herself a man, the way the good lord intended. Not like the last ones.” He snorted out his nose and shook his head disapprovingly.

A waiter came up with a tray of beers and passed six mugs around the table. Vietnam held his in the air for cheers. “To reunions and first meetings.” The five brothers toasted and took large gulps of their drinks. Idrissa scanned them over the brim of his mug.

The man directly to his right, Thailand, was the smallest of the brothers. He wore a floppy green canvas fishing hat. The hooks and beads stuck in the floppy bill hung down like ornaments framing his long, thin face. He was not a short man, rather he stood taller than the rest, but he was skinny and lanky, with long hair hanging down past his shoulders that gave him the look of a retired hippie. His pretty face would have been almost girlish if it hadn’t been marked with the scars and light sagging of middle age. He wore baggy jeans, an oversized plaid shirt, and green fisher’s vest, also ornamented with feathers and flies, all of which made him look even more lanky than he was because of the way it hung off of him. Although he bore distinguishable familial similarities, Thailand had pulled his major characteristics from a different side of the gene pool than the rest.

Egypt and Chad were also tall, but heavily built men, with large arms and big beer bellies. They cropped their hair short. Chad was clean-shaven. Egypt kept a small tuft of a goatee growing at the indention between his chin and lip. He wore a black T-shirt with a large American flag across the front, and a green canvas jacket.

Both of their heads were square and solid, like bricks, with strong square jaws as well, and large foreheads that seemed to be pushing their brows forward, as if guarding the rest of their face from a possible landslide.

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though he was squinting, but his head had a domelike quality, exaggerated by the fact he shaved it bald. There was still something babyish to the roundness of his face, which would make one guess him to be the youngest, but he was by no means the scrawniest.

His stomach, as with the rest of his body, was firm and muscular, statuesque, obviously sculpted from years of intense weightlifting.

He wore a tight T-shirt that showed off his muscled arms and their many tattoos, which ran together in swirling patterns, creating the illusion of multiple dimensions of spider webs, cavernous flames and multilayered rock formations that extended beyond the cloak of his clothing.

Vietnam wore a thick, sliver-studded black leather jacket over a sleeveless, white wife-beater and a blue jean vest on which he had hand sewn several military patches, the black and white POW MIA emblem, as well as several Marine logos including a skull and cross-guns embroidered with the slogan “Mess with the best, die like the rest.” On the back, a Harley-Davidson Eagle spread its flaming wings across his broad shoulders. Vietnam was built like a bear. His face was long, like Thailand’s, but large, with the familial square jaw and cranial accessories of his other brothers, giving his face an animalistic look, exaggerated by his thick brown beard, mustache, and sideburns offsetting the lack of hair on the top of his head, which had receded to baldness nearly to his ear line. But the hair on the back of his head was thick and he wore it long, in a mullet, a rat-tail hanging down to the middle of his back. When he spoke, it was with the deep grainy rasp of a longtime smoker.

“Now whatcha fixen to eat?” he asked, grabbing a menu from the lazy Susan.

“It’s a steakhouse, aint it?” Egypt said, stretching back over the chair and clicking his tongue, Idrissa noted, as Mya had a habit of doing.

“What kinda steaks we want though: sirloin, ribeye, tendrey loin?”

“Well hell, I’m getting myself a sirloin,” Egypt came again.

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“Sirloin” was echoed around the table and Idrissa agreed. Idrissa normally would have had his meat cooked well or medium well, but so as not to make them suspicious, went along with medium rare, which was the general consensus, with the exception of Thailand who ordered his rare, and Chad, who wanted his well-done, although he was heckled for it.

With their beers in front of them and having ordered their meat, the men were ready to get down to business.

“So, you saying you know for sure this horse of hers is down in Juarez?” Vietnam sat directly to Idrissa’s left. He narrowed his eyes at him and pressed a meaty finger into the table. “You one hundred percent on this, now?”

Idrissa nodded nervously. “Yes, yes. Like I said, I spoke to the current owner on the phone. I’d offered to purchase it from him in New Orleans, but he was very strange, and he insisted that if I wanted her, I would have to bid at the auction like everyone else.”

“Fuck that shit,” Brazil said, his right cheek muscle twitching with anger.

“He was very belligerent. Nonetheless, I am prepared to spend a portion of my savings. I just need assistance with the transport.”

All of the brother’s faces squished into messes of disgusted confusion. Vietnam, especially, stared at Idrissa in demented astoundment, his tongue pressed against his teeth, his lip curled up like an angry Elvis, his forehead wrinkled, and his flaring nostrils deforming his right eye. “What are you talking about? You wanna buy that thing back? You wanna buy back what thing’s been stolen?”

Brazil rocked sideways in his chair and nodded as if validating his own thoughts, also sucking on some suddenly disgusting taste in his mouth. “Mmmmm hmmm. Where’d you say your accent was from again. You British?”

“Oh, no, I’m African.”

“I know you’re African American,” he sneered, “but where’s that accent come from?”

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“Oh, specifically? Mali.”

“Molly? Where about’s that at?”

“Africa.” There was silence. “It’s a country in Africa.”

Brazil shook his head once to the right, ticking. “A country in Africa? Whatdya mean. You fuckin with us?”

Idrissa sat stiff and still. Three of the five faces were shooting him the same accusatory look. Luckily, Thailand placed his thin, patient hand on the table and leaned forward, directing his comments coolly toward his brother. “Brazil, Mali is a country on the continent of Africa. Africa is a continent, Brazil, remember, Chad’s in Africa.”

“That’s right?” Brazil nodded. “Oh yeah, that’s right.” The fog of tension lifted.

“Anyway,” Vietnam continued, “aint no way we came out here to pay cash money for something that’s been stolen from our kin.

Why’d you want our help, anyway? That horse was stolen from our own. We aint buying it back. That aint fair and square. We’re stealing it back like it was stolen in the first place. Don’t make any sense in goodness otherwise.”

Egypt picked up his beer and sipped it loudly then clanked it on the table. “That aint how my daddy taught me. That how your daddy taught you, Africa?”

“Me? My father? Oh I . . .”

“Let me get this right,” Brazil interrupted. “Someone steals something from you, and you’re planning on paying em to get it back? What do you call that logic?”

“Well I think this person who now owns her was not the one who originally stole . . .” Idrissa tried, but he was interrupted.

“They call that hornswoggling,” Thailand interjected.

“I call that getting fucked in this ass with no lube,” Egypt added.

“Bending right over and askin for it,” Chad hollered.

The men tossed a few more apt metaphors around before Egypt picked up the rope of thought and continued to his point’s end. “See here Africa, that’s why we’re Americans. This here’s just Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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the kinda mentality that keeps America the greatest nation on this green earth and all the others waiting in line. We don’t take no shit. What’s fair’s fair. It’s justice, and we aint no yellow-lily-liveredpansies gonna sit back and let someone take what’s ours. We don’t negotiate with terrorists and we don’t take no bribes or bend to no blackmail. This sort of thing got historical precedents.

“Mexicans tried to take our dear sweet Texas.” The other men groaned. “Huh, uh, we go on and get it back from em. Aint gonna pay for what’s rightly ours. British come in try to tax us for nothing, we do in with their precious tea. We caint have it, no one’s gonna have it. Same with the French and the Spanish. Now those Arabs come in and knock down our towers, we brought a shitstorm of hell down on their heads, gonna go on and get our oil back too. You see what I’m saying? Us five here, we’re pure US of A, through and through. Aint nobody more USA than us. We are America right here, boy,” Egypt said.

“Egypt, is it?”

“Yes sir.”

Idrissa nodded, “I see what you mean, yes. I think I do. Very much. That’s very illuminating.”

The waiter stepped up to the table balancing a tray piled high with steaks and baked potatoes. “Maybe that’s why Africa has so many problems you’re always hearing about, people over there thinking like that,” Egypt murmured to his brother Chad, as he tucked his napkin into his collar and sat back for his meal to be placed before him.

“I couldn’t believe my ears when I got a call from that ole girl, telling me she thinks she met someone who knows my little niece,” Vietnam growled, in his voice that was rougher than a vigilante’s stubble.

“All these years, we haven’t known if she was alive or dead.”

Egypt said, tenderness showing through. He looked like hell in black boots. But when he talked about his niece being alive or dead, he sounded like a boy who had lost his dog.

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“I’m still confused around that subject. Who did you say this woman was again?” Idrissa asked. He cut into his pinkish steak.

“Old friend of my sister’s named Cindy. Our girl’s mamma and her used to be thick as thieves, till Cindy got her panties all put in a wad over some retard.” Vietnam flipped a large piece of meat into his mouth and banged his lips around it as he went on. “That was some ridiculous shit to go to jail for, over some damned birds, some parrots or something. That woman’s trouble. Done went and got our sister locked up with her all them years ago. Looks like she can’t stay out of trouble, cause she gone done went and got herself locked up again. And I hear it’s over animals this time too. She must be some kinda environmentalist or something, going crazy about those animals all the time. Some folks never learn.”

“The police is the ones that need to learn. They never leave people alone. Why can’t they just let us alone?” Brazil said, cutting open his baked potato.

Vietnam pointed his fork at Brazil. “Yeah, you’ve been trying to teach the boys in blue something for a while now. How about it?

You think it’s working? You think they learning yet? You think those judges are gonna be learning something from you pretty soon? I guess that must be what you think. You go in for your classes offen enough.”

Brazil sat down his fork and wiped his mouth on his arm. “You need to learn to leave me alone, too.”

“I aint the one that needs to be learning nothing,” Veitnam said, taking another large bite of his meat.

“Yeah, you better, brother. Talking about what you don’t know,” Brazil came back.

“I know plenty about it. I’ve been paying the bail, aint I? I know about three hundred dollarss worth. You need to look at who’s standing at the podium and where you’re sittin next time you go into court to do some teaching.”

“I’m serious, just cause you’re my older brother don’t mean I won’t shine you.”

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“Just cause you my little brother don’t mean I’m gonna let you.”

Brazil laid his utensils down beside his plate, and turned menacingly toward Vietnam. “I’m just saying, people who live in glass houses should watch their mouths, cause I’ll break your face.”

They stared at each other, Vietnam holding his jaw in a suspended chew. The steaks throbbed on their plates. The smell of testosterone and butter filled the air.

“Excuse me,” Idrissa broke in. He realized his next two days were going to be like this, navigating around five large men, brothers who spoke for each other, finished one another’s sentences and broke in and out of spontaneous, inexplicable bickering. “I’m sorry, but you were saying, this woman, Cindy was it? You said she knew someone in jail who knows your niece?”

“She got herself put in down there at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson,” Egypt answered.

“They said it was manslaughter, weren’t it?” Vietnam asked, resuming his chewing.

“Involuntary,” Brazil hollered.

“She’s looking at up to six years cause this is her second time, but she said she could get off in two if she gets good behavior,” Chad told Idrissa.

“I’d like to see that woman try AND behave good,” Egypt said chuckling. Brazil picked up his utensils and went back to his meal, his right eye pinched half closed as if reacting to a metaphysical smack.

“Anyway, they got this other lady in there talking about our girl.

And you know our girl got a name that’s hard to be confused for someone else. So Cindy calls me one day all excited and say she thinks Panama’s daughter’s alive and well.” Vietnam was talking, drinking his beer and eating at the same time. It was an Olympic effort, but there were a few minor casualties, including but not excluded to hard consonants and some tiny bits of bread and meat, which flew like mortar, landing in front of his plate and on the napkin he had made his bib.

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“Who was this woman who said she knew her?” Idrissa asked.

“Some Paki.” Brazil said, cleaning his teeth with his tongue at Idrissa. Before this, Idrissa would never have imagined that it was possible to clean your teeth at someone.

“Naw, she’s Indian,” Vietnam corrected him. Brazil snorted at his brother, loudly clearing his nose as a refutatory statement.

There were all sorts of things, Idrissa realized, it was possible to do at people, which he would never have thought of.

“Cindy’s half Indian,” Thailand told them.

“Not that kind of Indian,” Chad said.

“Paki,” Brazil grunted again.

“You know, Columbus thought he was in India and that’s why he called em that. So it’s kinda the same thing,” Thailand added, holding up a piece of his steak and inspecting it. The center of his meat was bright red and juicy.

“Damn Thai, that thing even dead yet? It looks to me like it’s still kicking,” Chad mocked.

“Well yours looks like a piece of rubber with sauce dribbled on it. When I eat meat, I want something to remind me it’s meat.”

“Anyway,” Vietnam kept on, “there’s this girl down there in jail with Cindy, my sister’s old friend, who was talking about our girl and all. Cindy said she was sure it was her she was talking about.

I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t have any way to find her, and that one who says she’s a . . .” Vietnam seemed to be searching for words, “friend of my niece’s, or whatever they were, didn’t know how to get ahold of her either. So I just waited. But wouldn’t you know it, just about three weeks later, I get a call from my little niece herself leaving a message on my phone, and it was yer number on the ID. So here we are now. I guess all the signs pointing to go.

Guess it was just that time.” The five men nodded in agreement.

“And this other woman, the one that knew her, she’s in the maximum security prison as well? Do you know what for?” Idrissa asked.

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and directed his statements defensively. “My niece is from the country. She’s a real country girl.” He shook his head. “The thing about country girls is, they got big hearts. Sometimes they get pulled in by these city types. Country girls got big hearts and sometimes they don’t know bad when they see it. You know what I mean?”

“They want to like everybody,” Egypt told him.

“Want to think the best of people,” Brazil said, tapping his beer glass then burping.

“I know my niece, and that little girl wouldn’t hurt a hair on a flea’s head,” Vietnam said, pointing his steak knife at Idrissa.

“Not that she takes no shit. I mean, she was the lone survivor of the white tiger for God’s sake,” Egypt added.

“Tiger?” Idrissa gasped.

“She didn’t tell you about that?”

His head swam with disbelief. “I thought she was making up stories,” he choked out lowly.

“It’s true. Damn straight it’s true. Naw, it’s true as the day is long. Took a tiger to do her momma in. And that tiger weren’t the first that tried,” Egypt laughed. “If she grew up to be anything like her momma, she’s not gonna take no shit from nobody.”

“She aint gonna harm a hair on a flea’s head, unless of course, that flea bites her,” Thailand said, shaking his head ironically and chuckling too.

“God help the flea that bites one of our bitches,” Vietnam hollered. The men let up laughing, hissing laughs that broke their breath, sharing an inside joke. They raised their glasses in cheers, “God help the fleas in hell and God rest our sisters.” They finished off their beers and called out for another round.

“What’s she like anyway? We aint seen her since she was what, sixteen?” Chad asked.

“She still got that beautiful long red hair?”

“Red hair? No.” Idrissa stopped himself from adding, “not on her head.” “She’s dyed it black.”

“It’s still long down her back?”

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“No. It’s just above her shoulders kept . . . kinky.”

“Kinky? And black? Like a pickaninny thing?” Brazil asked him, accusingly.

“Naw, probably like a gothic. That’s what the kids are doing these days,” Thailand replied.

“Yes, it’s unkempt.” Idrissa thought about it for a second. “Like dreadlocks.”

“That makes sense. Her mom was a little bit of a hippie,” Egypt said.

“You know what the thing about a hippie is? Thing about a hippie is, you can’t beat the hippie out of them,” Brazil said, grinning evilly.

“But you can sure as hell try,” Egypt shouted, and gave a whelping hoot.

Idrissa stopped eating for a moment and eyed the men warily.

Vietnam shoved him and patted his arm a bit too hard. “Naw, we’re just joking around. We don’t got no beef with no hippies.

A little hippie got into our bloodline somehow.” He nodded to Thailand.

“It’s the Indian in us,” Thailand told him.

“Whatever it is, they always bring the best bud, and they sure are generous, and that’s all good with me.” Chad stretched his arms above his head and groaned.

“This friend of hers, you were saying, what is she in jail for?”

Idrissa asked.

The men became solemn and for the first time, completely hushed. New beers were passed around. Egypt took a drink of his beer and sucked his breath out. He wagged his finger at Idrissa. “I don’t care what no one says. That girl wouldn’t harm a flea,” he repeated, somewhat aggressively, but there was an embarrassment in it. Idrissa stiffened and sat back in his chair, not understanding.

Chad placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder, comforting him.

“It’s all right. I’ll say what no one else wants to.” Chad tapped his finger on the table and looked Idrissa seriously in the eye. “That Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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girl in jail, she’s that female terrorist. The one who bombed the factory in Saint Louis. Looks like our little girl got herself mixed up in some things bigger than her head is all. But God knows we aint proud of our family fraternizing with that type of element.”

“It’s a sad day when you got to be afraid in your own country,” Veitnam said, looking sideways and sucking a sinew from between his teeth.

Idrissa swallowed hard. A chill spread across his skin, prickling it to goose pimples. “Factory? The woman who attacked the Monsanto chemical plant? Is that who you’re talking about?”

“Guess so.”

“What do you know about it?’

“Only what I saw on the news.”

“Hey.” Something awful occurred to Chad. One could almost see the bulb lighting above his head. “How do we know he aint like that, if that is the kind who she’s up to these days.”

Brazil popped his pinky knuckle. “We love our little girl, but you gotta understand, we aint seen her since she was a kid.”

They were all breathing at him. “You say you’re from Africa, fella? You aint got no friends from Yemen or anyplace like that, do ya? You think it’s all right to go blowing things up?” Egypt asked.

“No. I definitely do not.” The men had fallen into paranoia again. Idrissa scanned their inquisitive faces, wondering how to respond. He placed his hand firmly on the table and squared his shoulders. “Listen, I’ve been here since I was a teenager. I was raised by Christian missionaries in New Orleans. I’m an American too. I’m as appalled and surprised as you are.” The words caught in his throat, but he pushed them out. “I love this country. I love the USA I don’t know where I would be if it weren’t for this country taking me in. To me, that’s America.” He hoped this wasn’t overkill, but from the looks on their faces, it was just right. These five brothers were a turbulent and inconsistent gauntlet to navigate.

“Best country in the world, USA,” Egypt said, raising his glass then drinking from it before anyone had a chance to cheers.

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“So she never mentioned nothing about that sort of thing to you?” Brazil asked.

“No. Never. Nothing,” he lied. She had more than mentioned “that sort of thing” to him. But she had never spoken of Monsanto, Saint Louis, or any ties with convicted domestic terrorists.

“She seem funny to you?” Chad asked, leaning over his nearly empty plate.

“What do you mean, funny?”

“Not like a comedian, just, you know, funny.” Chad flipped his hand in a teeter-totter motion, indicating unbalance.

Egypt clarified. “She was locked up in the kook house when she was little, after the tiger thing and all.”

“No, I didn’t know . . .”

“We hoped she’d grow out of it, but, there’s probably some things stays with a person. She grow out of it? She seem normal, or, I don’t know, normal?” Chad asked again.

Idrissa bit his bottom lip and nodded thoughtfully. What would normal even mean for these men, he wondered. What was their measure of normalcy? Never in all of his life would he have included the word normal in the list of things she was. But perhaps to them she would be normal. He realized, as he thought how to answer, that the things about her that would seem abnormal to them were maybe not the same things that struck him as particularly odd about her. He began to assure them that, at least, their cherished niece wasn’t crazy, but even that seemed horribly fallacious. He took a breath and tried again, “She is very intelligent, brave, quick, self-sufficient, an exceptional person.”

“She was always smart,” Thailand told him.

“Too smart,” Vietnam gurgled.

Chad chopped the air with his hand, “Does she ever go off like she thinks she’s a tiger? That’s all we wanna know. She ever get upset and start like, goin off like a tiger?” This was a definitive question, and apparently what the men had meant by normal: not occasionally acting like a tiger.

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“Oh. I see.” Idrissa exhaled and leaned back. The men watched him in anticipation. “Only in her sleep, or if you wake her up when she’s having a bad dream. But then just for a few seconds.”

The men nodded. “She’s got the Charlie syndrome,” Vietnam said, clearing his throat. “Well, if that’s all the worse it is now, I guess that’s okay. To be expected really, at least that anyway.”

“She’s still just a baby. If she’s made it that far, maybe she’ll get all the way better eventually,” Egypt said, cutting up the last of his steak.

The words stuck in Idrissa’s ears, she’s still a baby. “How old exactly is your niece?” he asked, his voice cracking as he did so.

“She never told you?”

“I’m just realizing, but no, she didn’t.”

“Well, don’t worry, Africa, she’s legal.”

“Just barely though. What would she be now, nineteen, twenty?”

“Oh.” “Well hell there, I didn’t know it was possible, but you goin pale.

How old did you think she was?” Brazil asked. Vietnam leaned over and gave Idrissa a hard pat on the back.

“Maybe twenty-four, twenty-five. I don’t know.”

The brothers chuckled.

“Anyway, it’s good. She’s young enough to get over some things, grow out of some unnatural phases,” Vietnam said, almost to himself, keeping his face down, his eyes narrowed with visible disturbance.

Thailand shook his head and cut a sliver off his diminishing slab of meat. “I told you, Nam, it’s completely normal for young women to experiment with Sapphicism. It’s part of a natural process of maturin.”

“Saphissasism? What the hell are you two talking about?” Chad asked.

“They’re saying about how she’s a dyke,” Brazil hollered, curling his lip. He looked apologetically toward Idrissa. “Cindy said her and that girl in the prison were dykes together,” he told him.

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“She tell you that?” Idrissa did not respond. “I don’t like thinking about my niece that way with anybody, man or woman. But, to tell you the truth, lesbians never bothered me, if you know what I mean. If I were you, I’d consider myself an ace in the hole. Lesbians are awesome, especially the ones that like men too. The fags though, the fruity guys, I’m not cool with that.”

“I second you there,” Egypt came back. “But I guess everyone’s got a right to live and let live. It’s a free country, long as they don’t hit on me. Then that’s something else.”

Vietnam ground his jaw and popped his knuckles in a tensed fist. “It’s all unnatural and not what the good Lord Jesus intended.

All of it.” Brazil rolled his eyes and let out a long sigh. Vietnam went on, “But it don’t matter, cause she got herself a man now, anyway.”

Idrissa kept deadly silent. He nodded yes and sucked on his beer, sipping slowly, hoping to cover whatever emotions might be showing on his face with the brim of the mug.

Thailand swiped his plate clean of juice with a piece of mushy baked potato, then licked his fingers. “I guess we better stop chewing the cud and get down to business, boys.”

“We gotta work out a tight plan. Don’t wanna head down to a place like Juarez with our dicks hanging out,” Chad said, crumpling his napkin and tossing it away from himself.

The waiter came and began clearing the plates. Brazil leaned back, making room. “What say you, Africa? You ready to get your horse thieving on?”

Idrissa decided to take his new name as a sign of fraternity, of being included in the family, rather than as a debasing moniker.

At least, he thought, they hadn’t decided to call him Molly. He squared his shoulders and laid his hands flat on the table in front of him. “I guess I had better be, hadn’t I?” “You sure you aint British? Cause you talk like yer British,” Egypt asked, downing the last of his beer then turning the mug upside down and exhaling proudly, smacking his lips. The little Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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remnants of beer bubbles slid down the sides of the glass and collected in a minor ring on the tabletop. horse snatching is a tricky business. In the league of animal

thievery, it requires more cumbersome materials to play the game than, say, snatching a ferret, a turtle, or a cat, for instance.

Thailand and Chad owned a small farm together, a strawberry patch they worked in the summers, as well as a few animals, including two horses. They’d brought along several bags of horse feed and their old wagon which they’d hitched to Brazil’s pickup, a blue Ford Bigfoot with forty-eight-inch wheels. The three other brothers were truck drivers. They’d left their trailers behind as they’d taken off time from their shifts for this excursion. In the parking lot, Vietnam’s Harley cabin sat next to Egypt’s Chevy diesel, caddy corner to the pickup which he drove when he wasn’t trucking. Brazil’s Ford pickup was adorned with an etching of Calvin pissing on Chevy, and, Idrissa noticed, Egypt’s Chevy diesel boasted an etching of the mischievous little boy pissing on Ford. Brazil patted the side of his truck. “Aint she a beaut?”

Idrissa nodded, “Yes, she’s massive.”

“Call me a chubby chaser.” Brazil took out a wad of tobacco, chewed it for second, then moved the bundle to his cheek. It looked like a tumor in the side of his face.

“How’s that transmission going?” Egypt asked Brazil. This seemed to be some hint of an insult Idrissa did not totally understand.

“Transmission’s fine,” Brazil bulked back. “Nothing wrong with a Ford transmission.”

Thailand and Egypt lit up two Winstons and sucked on them.

The dry Texas wind picked up, blowing dust and smoke around in a small tornado that dissipated as suddenly as it had come. The setting sun was painting everything orange.

“You ready for this?” Vietnam grabbed Idrissa by the back of the neck and shook him.

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“I know I am.” Brazil went around to the back of his truck, stepped up on the bed’s ledge and started banging things around.

He tossed out a brick, several planks of wood and the bags of feed, which landed in the gravel with a thud, the brick denting the ground. “Come on, take a look at this.” Idrissa stepped around to the back and looked into the empty steel truck bed. Brazil took a keychain out of his pocket, hopped down, and scooted underneath the truck. There was a clicking sound. He stood back up and pounded on the bed. “I got it custom made. It’s a false bottom.” He lifted the floor of the bed revealing a small arsenal: three shotguns, one .22, and three .45’s. “We got an extra, but I guess I’ll double fist it if I have to.” Idrissa looked from Brazil, to the guns, and back again. “You know how to handle a pistol?” Idrissa shook his head slowly, no. “Don’t worry. They aint registered.”

“Not even in Meheeco,” Vietnam growled, a grin curling his lips.

“But it’s different rules down there anyhow.”

“All right.” Brazil replaced the false bottom and removed the keys from the hidden lock below the vehicle. “Guess we can show you how to hold a piece once we get down there. Can’t go waving guns around up here.”

“We’ve got a good seven-hour drive ahead of us boys. Let’s load up. Who’s riding with who?” Chad shouted.

Brazil reloaded the feed and wood. “I gotta be extra careful crossing the boarder, what with what I’m carrying. You better ride with someone else. Your complexion might set off the border patrol.”

“He’s riding with me,” Vietnam said, his voice gravelly as the parking lot.

“And Thailand,” Brazil went on, “you got any Mary Jane on you? I can’t have no drug dogs getting all riled up over you smelling like a head shop.”

Thailand tossed his cigarette and looked guiltily away, “Just one personal joint, but it’ll be gone before we reach the border.”

“Huh uh.” Brazil waved his hand in the air and opened the door to his truck. “You go on with Egypt. Chad, you’re with me.”

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The men loaded up accordingly and the three trucks headed to the interstate, Vietnam’s Harley diesel cabin in the lead. the sky looked like orange peels floating on cloudy blue

water. The truck smelled of dust, cigars, and sweat. Conversations crackled over the CB radio, which Vietnam flipped through for a few seconds then turned down, so that it sounded like low voices coming from another room. “We got a drive ahead of us,” Vietnam croaked. His words seemed forced through a filter of pebbles, which did not make them more clean, clear, or smooth. “But it aint that bad. We should get there around three am Border Patrol will be all sleepy then. At least it aint a real redeye. You ever a drive a redeye before?”

“No. I don’t drive.” Idrissa sat straight as flag stuck in alien soil, as if an upright position might be enough to promote assimilation.

“What do you mean you don’t drive?” Vietnam kept his eyes tensed on the road. In fact, his entire body seemed tensed and pointing toward the road. Every muscle in him was focused on the road and on moving forward, nowhere but forward. The huge bulk of him was just an extension of his truck. Idrissa thought, if the truck ran out of gas, or a tire busted, Vietnam might just keep on going, by sheer unconscious willpower, steering wheel in hand, right through the windshield, just keep driving, truck or no truck, flying at sixty-five like some dense and lugubrious bird hovering over the highway, on for eternity. “You don’t know how to drive or you don’t got a license?”

“Both,” Idrissa answered. Vietnam didn’t turn his head to look at him, and his face did not change, but Idrissa sensed this statement had inflated some more of that indefinable suspicion these men all seemed to bounce around like a beachball, never knowing when or on whom it might land, and dependent upon the direction of the wind. He shifted in the bucket seat. Vietnam slammed his large stick from fifth into overdrive and relaxed his shoulders an inch.

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“I’m surprised this ole boy gave you the location of this auction.

Most of these things aint all that legal.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, well everything’s legal down there I guess. Everything illegal is legal down there. The cops is criminals, so it’s all part of legal.” He turned his face for a flash of a second and did what must have been intended as a smile. It looked more like a crocodile showing its teeth though, the way only his mouth opened, but the rest of his face remained unmoved. “It’s legal down there, but it aint legal up here.”

“How do you mean?”

“They take American horses down there to sell them for meat.

You don’t know that?”

“I didn’t. I don’t.”

“It’s a shame, with this repression on, all of our farmers are going broke, horses starving. Gotta sell em. Caint nobody buy them to keep to ride anymore. Gotta sell em one way or another.

Mexicans eat em. Mexicans buy em up and eat em, easy as cherry pie. Selling our pets to feed the Mexicans. Never thought I’d see the day. When I was a kid, it was the other way around. At least that’s what they said. Or maybe it weren’t an exact opposite. They said those Mexican restaurants here in America were stealing our pets then feeding them to us. Selling them to us. Cats and dogs for meat. That’s how I heard it. It were cat and dog meat at those Mexican restaurants. Either way, we getting screwed. The Mexicans keep finding new ways to turn our pets into tacos.”

“Do you think Aryan could go for meat?”

Vietnam scrunched his head up and groaned, churning out a thought. “I love tacos.” He shook his head. “That’s how they getcha.” Idrissa stared into the rearview mirror, watching the highway pass as the light continued to fade. “Did you say something, Africa?”

“I just asked if you think they might be selling Aryan for meat?”

Vietnam burped then coughed. “Nah, I doubt that. Hank’s Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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animals are pretty special. This guy, whoever he is, probably figures he can get a better bid for her down there, and get out of taxes and all that.” He cocked his head to the side, popping his neck. It cracked loudly. His body was like an old truck in constant need of maintenance. It wasn’t automatic. There was a manual mechanism for pushing gas through as well as a continual shifting of alignment.

“I’ve heard, though, that some of these rare and endangered species get bought up for fancy hunting games for rich people. You ever heard of that?” Idrissa shook his head no. “Bring em out to a mansion ground down south of the border, and these highfalutin millionaires pay thousands upon thousands to go kill themselves a lion, a polar bear, a panda, whathaveya. But, way I hear it, they tie the animals up so they can’t get too far. Don’t want your game mauling your millionaire. You ask me though, it takes a real pussy to shoot something that’s tied up. That aint no sport. I guess even most cunts I know wouldn’t do that. Takes a real jackass.” He fidgeted with the radio dial. “Hope you don’t mind. My stories’ll be coming on soon.”

“Stories?”

“There’s an am station does this old-style radio mystery show with the low budget sound effects, but the real thing: marbles rattling, glass breaking, like in the thirties. It’s cornball, but that’s why I like it. Main character’s Ellie, this real hot broad.” He wiggled his eyebrow and whistled, alluding to Ellie’s hotness. “She killed her husband for his money. But what she don’t know is he faked his death, cause he knew what she had planned, and he’s the one she’s gone on a date with last week, but in disguise. She didn’t recognize him. She thinks she’s in love. She’s in trouble though.” He clicked his tongue and his lip curled up in pleasure. “It’s been on a couple of years. I like to listen when I’m driving. Kills an hour a day. It’s better than listening to a bunch of assholes yell at each over politicians that’s all the same guy in the end, anyway, like Ellie’s husband and this new guy she thinks she’s dating. Yer gettin fucked by the same guy the same way whatever way, anyhow. Just a different face, different hair, different clothes, that’s all. Fuckin politicians.

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“And then there’s the actor druggies news, about actors drugging it up and whoring it up all over Hollywood. They always goin on about that on the radio. What do I give a damn if little American Heartthrob Miss Mary Sunshine likes to snort some rock and take it up the ass when she’s not pretending to be Little Mary Sunshine? It’s not like these star actor Hollywood people have any big responsibility to uphold morality in the world. They just giving teenagers something to stare at while they eat popcorn and give each other hand jobs. What do I care what they do?

“But the worst on the radio is the rap music. I can’t take that rap music.” He glanced at Idrissa. “Sorry if you like it, but I can’t stomach that shit. If you’re going to sing a song, just sing the damned song. Stop talking and sing, forgodsakes. I aint saying that just because they black.” Idrissa shrugged. “I like some old blues stuff. But that rap crap, I can’t take it. Makes my dammed head hurt. Rap crap.

“Every time I drive to the East Coast, that’s all I can get on the radio, that goddamned rap crap. I’ve been through New York State a few times over the years. Thank the good lord I’ve only had to deliver in New York City once, ever. I swear to God all they have on the radio in the East is that goddamned rap crap, and then sometimes some Spaniards screaming into megaphones and ringing bells. Makes my head hurt. I don’t know why she,” he said her name, “would ever want to go live in New York City.” Her name in his gravely mouth sounded even stranger than usual, more like a threat than a name. “Her momma was always wanting to get far away and travel, too. Guess it’s moved on to her head now.

But I know she aint gonna like it. She’s a country kid. She got a big heart. There’s no space for big hearts in that city. No space for nothing big, no big loving, big men, big trucks or little country girls with big ole hearts the way people living in those condominiums all packed together like bees in a hive. They’re like insects you ask me.” He made a mocking buzzing sound and grimaced. “Buzz, Buzz. Busy bees. Worker ants!” He hissed air out through his teeth Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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like a disgusted snake. “I’m glad yer from the South, Africa. Louisiana’s good. People move slow. Got time for people. They look you in the eye down there. Say howdy and hey and all. It’s good in Louisiana.” It didn’t seem like he was stopping anytime soon and there was no space to interject. Idrissa just let him go on with his amusing and enlightening truck driver’s armchair philosophizing.

“Naw, she aint gonna like it. I can tell you that right now.

“I had to make two deliveries that time I went there in Manhattan, one right in the middle of the city, and one downtown. Don’t know how I got my truck through those tiny, crowded roads. But those people up there, they don’t look at you. Look at you like insects look at you, right through you. Their eyes, you can’t tell where they’re looking, like flies. I bet they’re seeing twenty different things at once but not seeing nothing really. Not seeing nothing clearly and for what it is, like a real man with a heart and soul looks at something. All they see is what they need. They needed me to deliver. I delivered. That’s it. No time for chitchat. Probably didn’t like the way I talked.

“I met myself a Jew. First Jew I ever met. Well, that I know of.

He had one of those Yammahaws. Guess I wouldn’t have known he was a Jew if he didn’t have that thing on his head. So maybe I have met some and I didn’t know it. It’s hard to tell a Jew. I can’t see no physical difference. Wonder how Hitler got them rounded up so easy? I didn’t chitchat with the Jew then I didn’t chitchat with some other folks who were looking at me with their weird, fidgety eyes. Then I bought myself a ten-dollar sandwich and three-dollar cup of coffee. Ha! The sandwich was dry, and the coffee was too strong, bitter. Could have tap-danced on it. Three-dollar cup of coffee! Ha! I’ll tell you what, man comes into my town never been there before, I point him toward good eats at least. I go down to Marietta to make a drop, they give me a free cup of coffee and point me toward their diner and maybe a decent bar or motel. Even in Dallas, hell even in Chicago. Not in New York. You in. You out.

Push you right through like a piece on an assembly line. I never 454

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seen anything like it. New York City, boy oh boy. You ever been up there?”

“Just for a few days when I was younger.”

“What’d you think? You like it?”

“My guardians took me to the Metropolitan Museum and then Central Park. I remember liking it. But I was a teenager.”

“Guardians?”

“I was adopted, after my mother died.”

“That’s a shame. Sorry to hear that.” A deep male voice came over the radio, accompanied by the sound of wind chimes and a trilling piano tune. “Here it comes.” Vietnam turned the volume way up.

“Will Elsie discover she’s been duped, that her new dashing beau and the husband she believes she’s killed are really the same man? Will her husband fall in love with her all over again and forgive her evil deed, or will he take his revenge? Will Chalice the dog lead them all to the evidence they’ve been seeking or just dig up her favorite bone? Find out now on this brand new episode of, Crime Doesn’t Pay.” A timpani boomed.

“Ha. That’s just some humor about the dog. See what’d I tell ya? It’s just like a real, old-time radio show.” Vietnam grinned proudly at Idrissa. Idrissa was quite surprised that this hulking, grizzled truck driver would take such pleasure in a 1930s-style radio soap opera. But then again, stranger things had happened, so he decided not to think about it too much. His head was feeling heavy. He nodded and rubbed his eyes. “You don’t gotta listen with me. Yer missing the back-story anyway. Go on and get some shuteye, brother. It’s going to be a long drive.”

The sun was almost gone. Idrissa took Vietnam’s advice, curled sideways, and rested his head against the passenger window. It had been a long day already. He was quickly gone. the dream came like some weird hell spilling out. Idrissa found

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ridiculous tumbleweed blew down the sidewalk, rolling and bouncing, seeming almost to laugh. He heard a creaking and turned around. Beside a mahogany bed topped with a water-stained canopy, a red curtain shook in the breeze. “Go get her, boy.” In the hallway, the five brothers stood peering into the doorway. “Go get her, boy,” they repeated in unison, “boy, boy, boy oh boy,” then let up cackling. A gust of wind slammed the door closed and from behind the red curtain a long leg appeared, wearing a sparkling red, high-heel shoe and black fishnets. Its counterpart, the second leg, followed it out and together they carried in a tall, ancient, Mexican transvestite. She wore a long, black evening gown with a slit up the side and a white pearl necklace with small horses carved into the faces of the pearls. Her nails were long and painted blood red, matching her high, red eye shadow. Her lips were painted black, and when she smiled, the parting of the black lips revealed teeth sharp as fangs. She grabbed the slit of her dress, and pulled it up, posing for him. “I’m bought and paid for,” she said, in Vietnam’s deep, growling voice. She circled him twice then reclined on the edge of the bed and spread her legs.

“Who are you?” he asked breathlessly.

“Sweet Melinda.” The words fell out of her mouth in singsong tones of a devilish tune. Through a thick accent, she continued, “And I know who you are. You are mine. You always have been.”

She smiled again, too happily. The wrinkles on her face looked like deep, jagged caverns. He thought he could hear a tiger purring in her stomach. She held a finger up and motioned for him to come.

He stepped up to her and took her thighs in his hands. A sickness rose in him with his arousal. Her brown eyes seemed to dance in the candle light. The yellowed canopy trembled above them. “I’m yours,” she whispered into his ear. “I always have been.”

“What do you mean?”

She undid his pants and pulled her dress up. She was the same as him, but also the exact opposite. She inserted herself into him and him into herself. “You see? You see?” she screamed, and 456

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gnashed her fangs against her bottom lip till blood dripped down.

She smeared it on his cheek, like an awful kiss, and moved his hips with her hands so he began fucking her. “They’ll kill you,” she growled. He fucked her harder and felt like vomiting. “Those boys out there will kill you if they know what they paid for. Those real boys out there, those real men, they’ll kill us. They’ll kill us.” He watched the white horses on the pearls of her neck shaking. They began to run away. juarez at three am looked different than the bad dream, but

not much. The city was nearly empty. Anyone not looking for trouble had gone to bed. Dim yellowish lights glowed in the doorways of bars and apartments near the cheap motel where the brothers parked their trucks. A tension hung in the air. The men could feel it in their bones. It was the tension of empty streets in the middle of the night in Juarez. There was no other tension like it.

Idrissa stared at the graffitied wall of a building adjoining the motel, where a piece of wood had been patched against a dilapidating stone facade. The spray-painted words read “La trascendencia de esta fuego,” beside a flaming image of the devil’s head.

“Here we are,” Vietnam growled, clearing his throat. “Better get some shuteye. We got a long day tomorrow.” The men slung their bags over their shoulders and headed into the motel. the border guards hadn’t given them any trouble, and Idrissa hoped this was a sign that luck was on their side, and would continue to be.

When he woke, Vietnam was still snoring loudly from the bed opposite him. His snoring sounded like a tire-iron avalanche.

Idrissa went into the bathroom to shower, locking the door behind him, glad to get out of his tight undergarments, if only for a few minutes.

When he came back out, Vietnam was sitting on the edge of the bed, taking part in a complex series of nasal and throat

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evacuations. He slept only in his underwear. The bulk of him was reddening under his hairy chest, as he pounded on it, attempting to stamp out some more of whatever it was he was coughing up.

“Dressed already?” he asked, looking up at Idrissa between seizures. “Ehhckhahhh!” he spurted. He sat in his underwear with his legs spread, leaning forward and hacking. His balls were huge.

Idrissa wondered if maybe there wasn’t something wrong with them. They looked swollen. He thought it might be painful. He tried not to stare at the outline of Vietnam’s huge balls. “Ready to do some sightseeing?” Vietnam asked. “You been down south of the border before?”

“No, I haven’t.” Idrissa wondered if there was some hidden meaning to this statement. Vietnam stood and made his way past him to the bathroom. Guess not.

“We’ll buy you a souvenir then, a tiki doll. How bout it?” Vietnam laughed, slamming the door behind him. the auction was being held a few miles outside of what Idrissa interpreted as the border of the city, in an area consisting mostly of abandoned warehouses and empty dirt plots. The auctioneers had converted the old warehouses and garages into silos, capable of holding about twenty horses each, the way they packed them in.

The fenced-off “fair grounds” were bustling with Mexican as well as American cowboys and farmers, sprinkled with a variety of other, more scurrilous sorts. Idrissa and the five brothers fit somewhere in between the two, and so did not stick out. Actually, this may have been the only place in the world where the group of them might have blended in naturally. Of course. Why not? This was just where five brothers, three of them psychotic truckdrivers, one a grizzled hippie farmer, another, his farming partner, a slow-paced good old boy, and an androgynous political activist, were bound to end up eventually. This was just where they ended up. At a horse auction on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico. Where else? There’s nowhere else.

As they passed through the entrance, a dirt path between two

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metal fences, a man in an orange blazer handed them paper registration cards. “Let’s go to the registration booth and see what’s what,” Vietnam suggested.

“But we aint planning on bidding, are we?” Egypt asked.

“Hell no,” Vietnam answered. “I just want to see what’s what.

Maybe they got a list. This is a big place to find one little horse. We got all day though. That fella told you tomorrow was the day she’s going up, didn’t he, Africa? That’s the date for sure?”

“That’s what he said,” Idrissa answered.

They found their way to the registration booth. Vietnam borrowed a pencil, filled out his card and took it to the window.

“Hola,” he tried. “Tu habla English?” He pronounced the words slowly and loudly, faking an absurd Hispanic accent with all the words except “English,” ending the sentence with a hard North American punctuation.

“Si.” The man behind the window was stocky, baby-faced, in his early thirties. He wore the bored, serious expression of any cashier.

He took Vietnam’s card, stapled it to another piece of paper, which he placed in a folder, then handed Vietnam a worn cardboard paddle with a number written on it in permanent marker.

“Is that it?” Vietam growled.

“Si.” “We get a list or something?”

“List?”

“El Listo,” Vietnam shouted.

The man stared at him blankly. “List, for what?” the cashier finally asked.

“Oh good, you do speak English. A list of the horses. Is there a horse list?”

Without expression, the man turned around and produced about twenty sheets of paper stapled together. He pushed the list through the hole under the window. “Next,” he shouted, “El Siguiente!”

Vietnam didn’t move but flipped through the list, which had the names of the horses along with an identifying number and the Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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last names of the owners printed in columns on both sides of the pages. He nudged Idrissa. “You know the guy’s last name?” Idrissa shook his head no. “Listen, compadre,” Vietnam told the cashier, “this don’t help us. We’re lookin for a specific horse. You know where they keeping the white horse? It’s special. It’s got red eyes.”

The man sighed heavily and scowled at Vietnam. Vietnam kept on. “Ummm, es blanco, blanca horse. Blank. A. White. Horse. You know anything about A. White. Horse?”

The man shook his head in annoyance. “We having horses of all breeds of color. You go look, and you will see. You like it, you see one you like,” he pointed toward Vietnam’s paddle, “you hold up your stick. It’s yours. You see white horse, you hold up your number. This is all.” He waved at Vietnam to move on. “Okay? Okay.

Bueno. Hasta luego,” he yelled. “El Siguiente!”

“Come on. He don’t know nothing about it.” Brazil tugged on his brother’s arm. Vietnam grudgingly stepped to the side.

“Well, I guess we better get our mosey on,” Brazil said. “We got a lot of barns to check out.” many of the pens were overfull and the horses looked sickly, thin, agitated, and cramped. Vietnam and Thailand kept muttering that it was a damned shame, every time they found an overcrowded pen where the horses stomped in their own manure and responded with bucking and pitiful neighing to the hands that pulled them out to present them to perspective buyers, then shoved them back in, kicking their flanks to get them to move.

“Standing in the manure like that’s gonna rot their hooves,” Thailand observed.

“It don’t matter none. They gonna be slaughtered soon enough anyway,” Chad told him.

“It’s a damned shame,” Vietnam said, shaking his head.

It was bad to see. Idrissa felt so too, and was relieved to find these men had soft spots all over the place.

They inquired with several hands before they got a lead on the

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horse they were seeking. It was an American handler who told them, a young, scruffy looking boy with a thick Southern accent, who couldn’t have been more than a day over twenty. “She’s up about six more rows. I think the building’s number thirty-four. I aint been in to see her yet, but I heard she’s quite something. A few around here been asking about her. Not the typical buyers. I reckon she’s going for a higher price than most of these. She aint no feed horse, I reckon. You lookin to buy her?”

“We’re thinking about it,” Vietnam rumbled. “Want to see her first.”

“Yeah, I hear she’s something,” the kid went on, picking up a piece of straw and breaking it into bits. “They say she’s got red eyes. The owner told people that’s because of some special way she was bred, but folks around here is wondering if it aint maybe just a disease or infection, that’s why he’s selling her off. What’d you want to do with her, anyway? Show her or something?”

“I guess we’ll figure that out if we get her. Only a certain number of things you can do with a horse,” Egypt said.

“Unless you’re weird in the head,” Brazil added, smirking.

“Still, it’s a limited number,” Egypt retorted.

The kid laughed and shook his head. They told him goodbye and headed over to garage number thirty-four. the white horse , like starlight dropped in the dirt, stood in the dark shed where the sun edged sideways through the large entrances on both sides, dust stirring in the light.

“There she is,” Vietnam said, awe mixing with the gravel in his throat. “There she is, at the end there.”

There were fewer horses in shed number thirty-four than in the others. They were kept one or two to a pen. These horses were thoroughbreds, healthy and muscled. They held themselves with polished dignity and did not cry or stomp madly as the men made their way down the row to Aryan.

There she stood, her neck craned down, chewing on a pile of

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grass. She lifted her head when they approached, then went back to feeding, spitting out her nose and shaking her hind muscles as she did so. They stood in a line in front of her, taking her in.

“My God,” Brazil gasped, “look at that. She don’t even look real.”

“I never seen a horse that white,” Egypt said.

“She does look soft,” Thailand said.

“Boy oh boy, and look at that mane,” Chad said, stepping up then stepping back. “That don’t even look like horse hair. That’s so white, it’s almost see-through. What do they call that word?”

“Translucent,” Idrissa helped him.

“Yeah, what he said. God, she looks like something from another planet!” he shouted, then let out a hoot and clapped his hands on his thighs. The fat guard sitting at the entrance a few yards away turned his head and took a gander at them. He looked like an American, and old farmhand. He was so fat, his ass hung off the sides of the metal folding chair he was sitting in. He wore blue jeans and a flannel shirt, with a dirty old cowboy hat shielding his face from the sun.

The men watched the fat guard watch them, then looked back to the horse. “She really does have red eyes,” Vietnam growled.

“This is the kinda thing you gotta see to believe.”

“This is the second time I’ve seen her, and I still don’t believe it,” Idrissa said.

Brazil tapped his fingers on his thumb nervously and looked around, scanning the place. “We gotta figure this thing out,” he said, lowly. “If that guard’s just working for the fair, that’s one thing.

But this aint any fancy affair, so I doubt it. I’ll bet that guard’s privately hired security. Maybe a few of the owners go in on paying for it together. Who knows? But he’s gonna fight I’ll bet.” He eyed the fat guard. “He’s packing heat.”

“How can you tell?’ Idrissa asked, squinting toward the guard.

Brazil nudged him in the side. “Don’t look so obvious.”

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them at all. The fat guard really didn’t give a shit. He was chewing on a piece of beef jerky and staring at the dirt. It was noon, about lunchtime, and the fat guard knew as well as anyone, no one ever stole horses around lunchtime. He wasn’t worrying about anyone stealing horses after lunchtime either. If you’d have told him his shed was crawling with heavily armed horse thieves right now, he would have just fallen over from shock. There hadn’t been any horse thieving in the years he’d been working there. Crime was high around Juarez, but horse thieving wasn’t the bulk of the problem.

The fat guard was not privately hired security. He worked for the fair and had come down from his trailer park home in Texas every year for the last four years to work the auction and make some dough. He was making eight bucks an hour right now just for sitting around looking fat, and was one of about twenty men, most of the others Mexican, who were being paid to sit around and look big with pistols in their pockets. Most of his job consisted of either sitting around or breaking up arguments between drunken American cowboys and Mexican farmers, and sometimes intimidating guys who bid then couldn’t pay. He also made extra cash helping the owners with feeding and cleaning the horses, and running random errands. It was a week of work, and he did all right. It was some untraceable income on top of the disability pay he received from the state, so hey.

Brazil pointed at the fat guard and told Idrissa, “This guy looks harmless right now, but I’ll bet he could raise some real hell if pushed to it.”

He couldn’t.

Idrissa nodded. His palms moistened with sweat. He wiped them on his pants.

“Well, at least we got lucky with one thing,” Thailand said.

“What’s that?” Chad asked.

“There’s no fence.” He pointed to the opposite entrance, where beyond the open metal door, there was nothing but a quarter mile’s Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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worth of empty dirt field, littered here and there with trash. Thailand looked back at the guard. “Come on, let’s take a walk.”

The men made their way out of the shed. They stood outside of the gaping entrance staring off into the empty field. A horse neighed and paced in its pen. “I see what yer saying,” Brazil told Thailand. “If they keep this open at night, we could just pull the truck right up here and pick her up like at a fast-food drive-through window.” He sucked on his lip and took a few steps into the emptiness. “I don’t know though. That’s risky. The Ford can handle this, but I don’t know about the wagon. We have to make a run for it, it’s over. That wagon’ll tip if it’s a high-speed chase through a bumpy dirt field.”

“Let’s keep walking, see what’s up there,” Vietnam said. The men crossed the abandoned dirt field, heading away from the auction grounds. It was a ten-minute walk till they came to a small, black-tar service road on the other side. The road wound back around near the auction entrance to just below the overpass that exited onto the highway. “This is gonna be easier than skinning a baby alive then taking its candy,” Vietnam said, clicking his tongue.

“Is that what it’s gonna be?”

Vietnam chuckled. “Sure. I can see it already. All we got to do is park the truck with the wagon hitched up there on that road, then go through the field, sneak into the shed, knock out the guard, gag him and hogtie him, then one of us will be waiting in the truck, one of you boys can ride that horse over the field. Us other four will keep like a squad behind you, in case anyone tries to follow.

Then you can just load her up and head on out.”

“Is that all we gotta do?” Egypt asked. “Lordy, my good God. Jesus Christ.”

“Watch yer language brother,” Vietnam scolded. “We need the good Lord Jesus on our side right now.”

“Really, I could probably just purchase the horse tomorrow.

With my savings, I think it will . . .” Idrissa tried.

“Now don’t you start talking that shit again,” Vietnam shouted, 464

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cutting him off. He pointed a thick finger in Idrissa’s face. “We didn’t use our vacation days to watch someone not even kin buy back no fucking horse that’s been stolen from our family.” He cleared his throat and spit into the dirt. “Come on. I need a drink.

Let’s go get one of them Mexican margaritas and figure out who’s doing what.”

“That’s why they have so many problems over there,” Egypt mumbled to Chad as they headed back to the parking lot. they settled in a nearby bar and downed three margaritas

each throughout the course of the hour-long meeting, except Idrissa who abstained, much to the chagrin of the brothers. It was decided that Thailand would be the one to ride Aryan through the field to the truck, and Chad would stay in the truck to help him load up and make the getaway, since Chad and Thailand were the two most experienced with horses. It had been first suggested that Vietnam ride the horse, since he apparently had been somewhat of a rodeo hero in his youth, but he protested vehemently, and Idrissa couldn’t help thinking it was somewhat due to his swollen balls. Vietnam, he thought, should stick to the soft cushions of truck seats, or perhaps even he should take up swimming, Jacuzzis, and salt baths. Ever since that morning, Idrissa couldn’t look at Vietnam without seeing a set of monstrously swollen testicles. It was a very unpleasant thought.

Brazil, Vietnam, and Egypt were tasked with knocking out and hogtying the fat guard while Idrissa kept watch. They divvied up the guns, Vietnam and Brazil taking the shotguns, the other three, pistols. Idrissa held strong that he wasn’t comfortable carrying a gun, but Brazil held even stronger that any idiot with a working hand could use a gun, just point and pull the trigger. He also noted, somewhat demeaningly, that Idrissa was the scrawniest of the pack, and the one most in need of “packing some extra weight,” as he put it, if only for the fear factor. They finally compromised, deciding Idrissa would carry one of the .22’s but with the safety on.

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There was nothing left to do except eat some fajitas, sober up with hot coffee, and await nightfall. later was better . The dead of night when everyone was half awake was the best time to get the jump. By two in the morning, there was a harsh chill in the air. The nearby city lights obscured the stars and painted everything a vaguely brownish hue, although naturally, dry as the air was, it should have been a clear pitch black and shining starry night.

He didn’t know why, but he’d pictured them crawling. Instead, they walked nonchalantly over the abandoned field, fully upright, Vietnam and Brazil carrying their shotguns like they were something as ordinary as handbags. Vietnam had about five feet of rope hooped around his belt like a lasso, next to a leather holster housing his hunting knife. Egypt and Thailand carried .45s shoved in the back of their pants. Thailand also carried a horse bit, slung over his shoulder. Chad was waiting on the service road in the truck with the lights off, just like they’d planned. Idrissa kept removing his gun, the replacing it to the side of his belt, then taking it out again and placing it in his jacket pocket. He was afraid of accidently shooting himself in the leg. His hands were visibly trembling and his mouth had gone dry. The men watched him worriedly. About forty yards away from the auction ground, and on Idrissa’s fifth gun rearrangement, Thailand stopped the group and seized Idrissa by the collar with both hands. He looked through the brownish darkness deep into Idrissa’s eyes. “Do you believe in God?” he asked.

“I . . . I . . .” Idrissa stuttered. “No.” He tried some composure and squared his shoulders. “No.” “Great spirit? Muhammad? Krishna?”

“No.” “King Fish? Chubakarbra?” Thailand asked.

“What?” Idrissa shook his head and swallowed hard. This was making things worse.

“Listen, Africa,” Thailand said, “whatever you think about

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that, you better give this next hour of your life up to some higher power, cause you’re as ready as you’re ever gonna be to steal your first horse, and there aint anything more you can do about it. This kinda thing is an act of God. You understand?” Idrissa stared back at him in confusion, trying to conceptualize horse thieving as an act of God. “All I’m saying is, what’s gonna happen is gonna happen, and it don’t make no difference where you put that gun or which way your dick’s hanging. It’s up to the universe now.” He patted Idrissa’s cheeks like he was applying aftershave. “Now take a breath.” Idrissa and Thailand breathed in and out together. Thailand looked him squarely in the eye one more time. “You ready for this?”

Idrissa nodded hard. Vietnam and Egypt patted him on the back. They stepped forward together like a pack, five wolves in weirdness’s clothing slinking through the night.

The fat guard was already fast asleep when they crept through the opposite entrance. He had gotten up and moved around on errands several times that day, but there was no indication of this.

He was still sitting in the same metal folding chair, in the same position as when they’d left him. A half-chewed piece of beef jerky lay at his feet. It was a different piece of jerky than the one he was chewing earlier that day, but it might as well have been the same one for all anyone cared.

“I think he’s sleeping,” Brazil whispered. Now they were crouched down, peering around the walls of the entrance, just as Idrissa had pictured it. “We gotta be fast,” Brazil continued.

“That motherfucker’s big. I’ll bet he’s fierce too.” He wasn’t. “Get him halfway, and it’ll be like getting a wounded tiger by the tail.”

Actually, getting him halfway would have been more like getting a wounded veal calf by the tail. But the men would never know that, because they got him all the way on the first try.

Since he was already deeply asleep, he didn’t notice he’d been knocked out when Brazil smashed him over the head with the butt of his gun. The fat gaurd groaned then fell into a deeper sleep, if Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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that was possible, and fell over, out of his chair, onto the ground, right on top of the half-eaten piece of beef jerky. The men grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him back into the shed. Some of the horses whinnied and stamped. Aryan watched them coolly with her left red eye, her muscles tensed, her ears twitching. Idrissa peeked around the side of the entrance, keeping a lookout while Vietnam hogtied the fat guard, keeping him facedown on his big belly, his hands and feet tied together behind his back, part of the rope strung around his head, through his mouth like a gag. “Never thought I’d need to use this trick again. Goes to show, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Vietnam joked.

“I didn’t think I’d be riding bareback again,” Thailand said lowly, swinging open the gate to the pen. “But there’s no time for saddling.” Aryan took three hard stamps away and bucked as Thailand entered her pen. “Damn, she’s a beauty. A white beauty.

Come on girl.” He held out his hand. She sniffed at it, but when he reached up to touch her head, she bucked away and neighed.

“Damn, someone’s gonna come soon and fatso’s gonna wake up.

I don’t got time to break a horse. You know if my niece rode her, Africa?”

“She said she did.”

“Well, all right.”

“Don’t worry about him,” Brazil told Thailand as he knocked the fat guard in the head once more with the butt of his gun, but lighter this time than the first. That fat guard was really sleeping now. He never even knew what sleeping was before.

“It’s you and me, lady,” Thailand told the horse, as he took off his jacket and slung it over her eyes. He pulled down tight on the jacket. She moved forward to his pulling. “That’s just how my first date went,” he laughed. “It’s easy as pie when she can’t see nothing.” He led the horse over to the fence, stepped up on it and slung his legs over her back. She was blindfolded by his jacket, and kept still. “Give me the bit.” Egypt took the bit, and the two men slid it into her mouth. Thailand removed the jacket and fastened the 468

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straps around her head. She stepped sideways. He pulled her back, right. She followed. “She’s all good.”

“Oh shit.” Idrissa’s hairs stood up. “I see some people coming.

They’re just two sheds down. They just came out of it.”

“How many?” Vietnam asked.

“Three, three guys. They’re coming this way.”

“Giddyup!” Thailand shook the reins and walked Aryan out of the pin. “You boys better have me covered,” he told them, trotting her to the opposite entrance that opened to the field. “Let’s get this on.” The men followed behind him, but as soon as he hit the opening, he took off on the back of that white horse like a shooting star going out across the ground. The guard was still lying in the middle of the shed between the rows of horses.

“Those guys might notice that,” Vietnam growled, moving briskly forward.

“What do we do?” Idrissa asked.

“Run, brother. Run.” Vietnam answered. And they did. thailand and aryan had already all but disappeared into the brownish darkness before them. It was easier for a man and a horse. Idrissa and the other brothers had over a half mile to cover on foot, and just a few yards out from the auction grounds, they heard the sound of men’s voices behind them, shouting in Spanish.

“Guess they noticed,” Egypt hollered.

Bulky as he was, Brazil was in the lead. Idrissa was rushing alongside Egypt and Vietnam.

“They think they want to catch us, but they don’t want to to catch us,” Vietnam belted out between gasps, pumping his arms hard like levers as he ran.

Idrissa found himself falling behind with each step. The two men looked like buffalo barreling in front of him. From the sound of the shouting, the night guards seemed to be gaining on them.

Suddenly, shots rang out. Idrissa ducked his head. As he did so, his foot caught on something that was probably nothing at all, and he

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was sent tumbling in the dirt. Another shot rang out, and someone shouted again too loudly for it to be behind him. He felt something stabbing in his side before he could even quit tumbling. It hit again.

It was a foot with a boot on it. Two men rushed past him, while one stood, kicking him in the stomach. In a move that surprised even himself, Idrissa caught the man’s ankle on the third kick, and tugged, toppling him onto his side. More shots were ringing out from the distance, somewhere ahead of where he had been trying to get to.

Idrissa grabbed his gun from his pocket and quickly pointed it at the shadowy man lying beside him on the ground. The shadow moved quickly forward. Idrissa pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

The man leapt on him and began pounding him furiously in the head with his fist. Another shot was fired in the distance, and he heard someone wail loudly, once, before he lost consciousness. The man kept on pounding Idrissa in the face for a while after Idrissa lost consciousness, even though he was obviously completely limp.

The man stood up and looked at Idrissa lying there, bloodied and knocked out. He lifted his foot and kicked him in the ribs, just for fun this time. He was preparing to lift his boot for one last kick, when an arm big as a redwood and more fragrant than a porkchop caught him from behind and wrapped itself around his neck.

“Whoa there, Jose,” came the voice that sounded like Satan’s dog with a throat infection. The man stiffened in his grip. “Welcome to Vietnam, Mexico,” he whispered into his ear.

The night was suddenly quiet again. If you were listening for it, you would have heard the chirping of cicadas in the distance, and a willow sighing somewhere far off. The silence was broken only minorly by the soft sound of whimpering, as Brazil and Egypt trotted up, each leading a man at gunpoint. Brazil’s man was limping and holding his leg. It was too dark to see, but blood was trickling down from his lower thigh. “Stop yer bellyaching,” Brazil said, poking him in the back with the butt of his shotgun, urging him forward. “Yer lucky I gotcha in the leg. It’s so dark, I coulda easily just killed ya.”

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“Seems pretty lousy to lose your life over a goddamned horse,” Egypt told him. “Someone else’s horse, at that.” When they got close enough to see, they stared down at Idrissa, disgust spreading across their faces.

“Why’s the bad shit always happening to Africa?” Egypt said, scratching the back of his head. “Goddamn!”

Vietnam tugged his arm tighter around his man’s neck. “Thailand and Chad head out?” he asked.

“I think so. That was the plan. No matter what happens, we told em to go on. Looks like they didn’t waste no time mulling that over,” Brazil said, looking back toward where they had left the road.

“He’s out?” Egypt asked, motioning to Idrissa. Brazil’s man moaned and said something quickly in Spanish.

“I told you, silencio,” Brazil said, nudging him again with his gun. The man held his hands higher in the air, but kept speaking in Spanish, kneeling slowly as he did so and nodding his head.

“What, you want to sit down? Reclino? Down?” Brazil asked.

The man nodded. “All right, whatever,” Brazil said, waving his gun dismissively. The man slowly moved his hands to his leg, as if asking permission to hold the hole. “Yeah, fine, just keep your hands there.”

“Take a look at him, wouldya?” Vietnam told Egypt, nodding to Idrissa.

Brazil pointed his gun at Egypt’s guy. Egypt knelt down and cradled Idrissa’s limp head in his hands. His face was swollen and blood was running all over it, coming from his nose, lips, a gash above his eye, and God knows what else. “He’s alive. He’s warm, got a pulse and his nose is bubbling,” Egypt told them. “He’s just out cold. Sure is a little feller.” Egypt tilted Idrissa’s head in his hands. “Hey, Africa, wake up!” he shouted in his face. Nothing happed. Egypt patted his cheek. Nothing. He lifted his hand, and smacked him once, hard across the face.

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back. “What the hell did you do that for? Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

“I was trying to wake him up.”

“Does he look like he needs to be hit in the head any more than he already has been?” Vietnam was spitting as he hollered, his face turning red, his eyes bulging. Something in him felt all soft and protective and it sure pissed him off.

“Yer a reeeetard,” Brazil let out, somewhere between laughing and moaning, pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head. “Egypt, yer retarded sometimes, man.”

“This is pissing me off,” Vietnam yelled. In one bearlike move, he unleashed his man from his grip, spun him around and shoved him down onto his knees. Egypt’s guy jumped, startled. Egypt poked him with the gun. He gasped loudly, then settled.

Vietnam tossed his shotgun on the ground, and grabbed his man, the one that had beat Idrissa, by the shirt collar. “Give me that extra pistol.” Brazil gave Vietnam that extra pistol. Vietnam squeezed hard on his guy’s jaw. The guy’s eyes were bulging.

“Open your mouth.” Vietnam demonstrated for him. The guy’s eyes teared up. He opened his mouth. Vietnam slid the barrel of the Colt .45 between the guy’s lips and worked it back and forth like a blowjob. The guy pissed his pants. His teeth rattled making clinking sounds against the cold metal. “Tu habla English?”

Vietnam asked him in exactly the same tone he had asked the attendant earlier that day.

The guy’s eyes danced crazily and his head rattled quickly in the no direction, but his head shaking was impeded by the Colt .45 Vietnam had shoved down his throat. “That’s Africa there,” Vietnam told him anyway, anguished rage piercing his words. The other two hostages watched stiffly, their mouths open and going dry. “That’s my African there!” he screamed, his spit hitting the man’s cheeks adding to the wetness of his tears. “That’s my African, and he talks prettier than any college girl I ever met. Too bad for you I grown fond of him over these days.” Vietnam was tearing 472

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up. His voice squeaked on the word “girl.” It sounded like chalk going haywire on a blackboard.

The brothers shifted their weight, eyeing Vietnam worriedly “Come on now, Nam. Whatcha gonna do? Calm down, man.”

Vietnam kept on. “That’s my little buddy,” he said, wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt. Brazil looked away. “You didn’t have to beat him that bad. He’s a little feller.” The man’s eyes kept dancing. They were doing a waltz now. Pretty soon, they might be doing a jig. “Look at him, he’s tiny.” Neither of them looked at him. “Goddamnit all to hell. He wouldn’t be all fucked up like that if it weren’t for us. This is almost as bad as having a woman in the battlefield. That’s it!” Vietnam looked to Egypt, pressing the gun further into the guy’s throat. “I’m saying it here and now, once and for all, I’m against those suffragettes! This is about bad enough.

And over a damned horse!”

“Come on, Nam. Calm it down.” Brazil urged. He was worried his brother was on the verge of a flashback to Iraq—the first one.

“We don’t want a murder on our hands.”

“He damned near killed Africa!” Vietnam hollered back. “He’s lucky I don’t chop his head off.” He leered into the man’s eyes.

“What’s one more beheading in Juarez?”

“What are you gonna do?” Brazil asked again, unsettled by his brother’s emotional state.

“Africa’ll be all right,” Egypt tried. “We gotta get outta here.

Somebody had to have heard those shots. Somone’s gonna call the police, soon. We gotta get.”

“You are fucking reeetarded,” Brazil told Egypt. “We’re in the middle of an abandoned lot outside of Juarez, Mexico. Yeah. They aint used to hearing shots around here. I’m sure the police are gonna be all over this real soon, dimwit.”

“You better stop calling me that, or I’m gonna shove it where the sun don’t shine,” Egypt told Brazil.

“You would, you faggot,” Brazil retorted.

“To hell with this,” Vietnam growled. He took the gun out of Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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the man’s mouth then quickly busted him in the side of the head with the handle. The man fell over, holding his head and howling.

Vitenam grabbed him back up by his collar and punched him as hard as he could squarely in the forehead, then in the mouth, then in the jaw. He seemed to be trying to make it symmetrical with Idrissa’s wounds. Somehow the guy wasn’t out yet. He tossed him to the ground and kicked him once in the ribs. The guy groaned.

Vietnam grabbed his shotgun and butted the guy in the head with it. He was out then, and if he wasn’t, he was doing a damned good job of pretending.

“Alrighty then,” Brazil said.

Vietnam propped his gun against his leg and clapped his hands, dusting them off. “Now what do we do about these two?”

“Hogtie em?”

“I only brought enough rope for fatso.”

The guy with the bullet in his leg started yapping. They couldn’t understand what he was saying, but they could tell he was begging.

“Huh uh, compadre,” Brazil told him. “You tried to kill me. You already lucky you got off so easy. That’s just a meat shot you got there.”

“Take off their belts,” Vietnam ordered The brothers took off the men’s belts. Egypt and Brazil took off their own as well, shoving their buckles into their pockets. The guys without the bullet wound got hogtied and the guy with the bullet wound just got regular person-tied. Brazil ripped off a part of his shirt and wrapped it tight around the guy’s leg, just to be nice, cause Vietnam’s speech had made them all a little sentimental.

“Morning’s coming in a few. Someone’ll see you,” Egypt assured them in English, which they couldn’t understand, so it was really just him bullshitting.

“Take my gun,” Vietnam told Brazil. Vietnam knelt and scooped Idrissa up. He carried him like he was his bloody bride, his head resting on Vietnam’s shoulder, his legs dangling over his arm as they sauntered back across the dark dirt field to Vietnam’s 474

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Harley diesel, which they’d left parked near the overpass. Idrissa moaned a couple of times as they walked, but did not wake. idrissa woke at five in the morning, finding himself on the

floor of a public bathroom. The bare light bulb buzzed and flickered above him. A bag of ice sat mostly melted on his forehead.

He sat up, knocking it off, and found a mess of towels beneath him. His head throbbed and ached. He coughed into his hands.

Blood covered them. He stood wobblingly and went over to the sink where a filthy mirror reflected horror back at him. He did not recognize himself. Dry blood and sweat caked his face. His left eye was swollen shut, and his eyebrow and lip were badly gashed.

He spit into the sink. A back tooth came out clinking against the drain. He turned on the faucet, attempting to clean his face with his hands. He felt nauseous and dizzy, so he clung to the sink trying to gain some balance. As he stood there, his head hung, he noticed his pants were damp where he had pissed himself. He groaned loudly, then went back to splashing himself with brownish liquid produced by the rusty faucet.

The door opened behind him. “He woke up,” Vietnam shouted.

It took Idrissa a few seconds to remember where he was and who he was with. When he did, it still seemed like a bad dream. Vietnam stepped in and took him by the arm, steadying him. “Woah there little buddy. Don’t try too hard. You took a real pounding.

Here.” Vietnam dipped his hand under the faucet and helped him clean his face.

Brazil poked his head in through the door. “Well aint this sweet,” he said, grinning. “I’m glad you woke up. This one’s been coming to check on you every ten minutes for the last hour. Looks like you got yourself a new sweetie pie, Africa.”

“Would you shut your yakking and hand me that drink,” Vietnam hissed, agitated. Brazil handed him a shot glass. “Here, drink this. It’ll take the edge off.” Idrissa raised his one un-swollen eye wearily to Vietnam and nodded. Vietnam tipped the glass to his Track Seven: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

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mouth. Idrissa coughed and gagged. “Oh, guess I should have told ya, it’s tequila.” Idrissa swallowed hard, chocking it down.

“Water?” he croaked, pitifully.

“Go get this man some water,” he ordered Brazil.

Brazil returned with water and Egypt. They took part in cleaning Idrissa up as best they could. Chad brought him in a clean change of clothes, bluejeans and a flannel shirt that were both too big. They tried to help him undress. It took all the strength he had to refuse vehemently and insist on changing in the stall. “He’s a shy one,” Chad bulked. “You aint got nothing we aint seen before,” he hollered through the door.

When he was done, they led him out into the dusty, dark little bar and sat him down at a wooden booth in a back corner. Vietnam went and got a piece of raw meat from the tender and laid it across Idrissa’s eye, ordering him to hold it there. Egypt brought over a round of tequilas and some aspirin. There were only two other people in the place, an old man who seemed to be sleeping on the barstool, his head flat on the bar, and a stout Mexican woman who appeared to be the owner.

“Where are we?” Idrissa asked.

“Well, it aint the Hilton,” Vietnam answered. “But it is still open at five in the morning and that’s good enough for us.”

“Are we in Juarez?”

“Nah, we somewhere between here and there. It’s Mexico though. Couldn’t bring you back over the border in the state you was in.”

Idrissa leaned his elbow on the table, holding the meat like an eye-patch against his head “Hey, cheer up, Bucky,” Chad told him, patting his back. “We did it. We got that goddamned horse.” The men raised their glasses in cheers then tossed them back. Idrissa made a fumbling attempt to take a sip of his water. He could feel his heart pounding in his ears.

“You just hang tight. We’ll get you some food. How’s about a 476

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tortilla soup? Then we’ll clean up that face of yours. Hell, maybe we’ll even find some soap to put on it. You’ll be good as new.”

Vietnam told him.

“We got Aryan?” Idrissa asked, lowly.

“Damn right we got her,” Brazil told him. “She’s right out there.” He pointed to the front of the bar, out the window, where his Ford pickup was parked with the farm wagon hitched to the back. Idrissa stared at it, squinting. “She’s right in there. Keeping an eye on her. We done stole ourselves back that albino horse.”

“How’s it feel to steal your first horse?” Thailand asked.

Idrissa trembled and licked his dry, swollen lip. “Have another drink,” Vietnam said, pushing a shot glass into his hand. Idrissa did, and coughed.

Vietnam took another drink too and looked toward the window.

He leaned back against the wall and let out a long sigh.

“Now all we gotta do is cross the border with a bruised African and a stolen animal, find out where our girl is, and deliver one white horse to New York City.”

“Is that all we gotta do?” Egypt asked mockingly.

“Nah. Most of that’s all he’s gotta do,” Brazil said, nodding toward Idrissa.

Idrissa slapped the meat slab down on the table and finished off his shot. He shook his head and slammed the shot glass bottom up.

The last remnants of tequila slid down the side of the glass and collected in a minor ring on the wooden tabletop.

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track eight

Building a Mystery Oh you’re a beautiful, a beautiful fucked up man.

You’re setting up your razor wire shrine.

—Sarah McLachlan And whoso falleth not down and worshippeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.

—Daniel 3:6 (AV)

the rain bore down as she stumbled off the boat, onto the Chelsea pier, her raccoon makeup streaming down her cheeks in long black lines. She carried her bulking bags low at her sides, swinging them with great effort, two pendulums reeking of the Hudson, propelling her through the night. She crossed the highway and made her way through a row of buildings. She came to a cross-street, and a high light in the distance caught her eye.

Through her drunken haze she saw it, the Empire State Building, an accident appearing in the opening of the skyline, but owning and overpowering everything. There it was, tall and white, sparkling like an inland lighthouse, as her mother had said so many times, calling her out of the storm. This place that was far away from everything, from what was chasing her and all the bad blood.

That tall, lighted building, representing everything of escape and newfound security, was a fantastical liberation.

She had finally made it to the biggest sparkling place, where

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her mother had assured her, she could be free. She recalled her mother’s words: “Aint nothing beautiful and big and bright as that Empire State Building. I seen pictures folks took from on top of it. On top of that building, you can see everything. It’s so tall you can see the whole world, see all of civilization.” When she finally made it up there to the top of that building, she thought, she would be able to finally see where Aryan was. Somewhere in this wide country, there she would be, a tiny shining white horse visible in the distance.

Lightning cracked open the sky, accompanied by a timpani boom. Rain poured like a sheet being laid. She darted to the nearest doorway and stood shivering. Something buzzed softly above her head. She turned her blinking eyes upward, finding a pink, neon sign, which had once read, “BE SAVED BY JESUS,” but now, decrepit as it was, simply read, “ SAVE US.” With trembling hands, she opened the church door.

He turned and stood, watching her clumsy entrance, the battle with the wind and spurting rain as she slammed the door three times, finally shutting it, and shook her wet hair out like a soiled dog. “Can I help you?” he asked, hearing his voice echo and fail the length of the long aisle that divided them. Without giving him any notice, she sat her soaked self into the back-most pew, along with her bags of plenty, and groaned into her chest, before slipping startlingly quickly into a faint sleep state.

A tree grew from the handle. He steadied his cane against the floor. A three-legged man, he made his way clopping down the aisle. The clink, clink, clink of his trioed step did not wake her.

She looked like a drowned rat. Her black hair covered her face in wisps. It did not appear to him as though she were actually wearing clothes, but rather as though a tangled nest of burlap and black lace were haphazardly orbiting her sphere. He viewed her with a tilted disgust. Her lips burred as she snored, her arms folded against her plump chest. The smell of mildew and whiskey wafted up. He poked her with his cane. She didn’t budge. He squared his Track Eight: Building a Mystery

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thin body and took another go at it, more forcefully this time, into her right shoulder.

She swung her hand out and grabbed hold of the poking end, a strong grasp, this one. Slowly, she turned her head toward him.

Their eyes met. She saw him through the lace curtain of inebriated half-sleep. She narrowed her gaze, wobbly, defensive, a drunken queen preparing to order an execution. He tightened his grip on the cane and yanked. Her grip stayed.

“What are ya?” she demanded, “some kinda vampire fag?”

He yanked again. She held her grip, but this time her body went with the cane, and her head cracked against the side of the pew.

Down she fell into a bruised unconsciousness once more.

He experienced a moment of regret at his overreaction. Then, positioning his cane against the marble tile, he decided it could not have been helped. With one arm, he scooped her up and began dragging her down the aisle, as he called for the boy to help carry her to the room reserved for such occasions. the morning sun felt like a heartbreak on her forehead. She sat up in the bed and took account of her austere surroundings: four gray stone walls, one frugal window hanging above the hard, thin bed she lay upon, and a small wood table with a set of white sheets folded neatly upon it beside the door. Other than that, the room was empty. The walls were bare. The sun was shining down, and dust mingled with the light. She touched her forehead, seeking the source of pain, finding a tender lump near her temple. She tried to recall the previous night. She remembered leaving the boat and thinking that she’d seen the Empire State Building shining in the distance. She remembered rain and rushing along an empty street to find shelter from the rain. Beyond that, she was at a loss.

She swung her black boots over the side of the bed and crossed the cement floor. The door wasn’t locked as she’d momentarily worried it might be.

A mob of angels stared down at her from the domed ceiling:

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Cherubim, Seraphim, and Nephilim. Other than the painted angels, the sanctuary was empty. Five rows of candles sat unlit below an altar where Jesus hung, splayed, pale and thinning on an enormous cross. “Catholics, again?” she muttered to herself. “Aw, jeez.”

From the hallway beyond the altar, she made out the sound of muffled voices. She followed the sound to another door and stood for a moment, pressing her ear to the crack, listening. She heard someone speaking for several minutes. A round of applause rose up, followed by silence.

She opened the door and stepped in. The congregation simultaneously turned to view her, quickly deciding she was not that interesting and returned their attention to the speaker. She stood with her back to the door taking it in, not noticing the two who held their gaze steadily upon her, a tall thin man with a cane propped next to him, sitting in the front-most pew, and a small boy with golden brown locks of curly hair, adorned in a white robe and a silver halo, which was attached by a wire hovering above his head.

About fifty people filled the mahogany pews behind them. This seemed to be some sort of church service, but not like any church she’d ever seen. The members of the strange congregation sat in lazy repose, sipping wine from small plastic cups. A few smoked cigarettes. The smells of cigarettes hung around the room like bored teenagers in a mall. The people did not, in any way, resemble Christians. They were a disheveled and demented lot. She was used to demented lots, but this bunch had something new and unfamiliar about them. Their strangeness immediately appeared more serious than the dirty travelers she was accustomed to. They were much older than her, and although they were dressed oddly, they were dressed well. They held severe expressions, as if what was happening was of extreme importance. A large man with a gray beard grown down to the middle of his chest, wearing a black ball-cap displaying a hand-stitched skull and crossbones above the bill, sat silently with his arms folded, furrowing his brow in Track Eight: Building a Mystery

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attention. Next to him an older woman, whose bleached blonde hair stood high in a beehive, a dead mink wrapped around her neck, sat sipping her wine as she smiled hysterically through white, horn-rimmed glasses, cackling loudly, pointedly every few minutes at the speaker’s words, although Mya could not find any humor in what was being said.

The man at the pulpit had globe-like eyes, widening to unnatural proportions, struggling against the small folds of flesh surrounding them, yet maintaining their constant twinkle. He coughed and gave his head a shake, spitting the words out slowly around his protruding yellow teeth.

“The air is open, There are no more heaters, Understandably A pipe is needed, Pleasant moments Heaven knows the place of our desires Short fires Three youths on a walk On the walk . . .

Tuning up a fork Joderowski . . .”

The congregation burst into applause. The speaker bowed his head and waved, very happy with himself. The thin man with the cane stood and traded places with the man at the pulpit. He 482

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thanked the man who had been at the pulpit, “Thank you, John.”

The crowd clapped again. He thanked the crowd for coming.

A woman with one giant red dreadlock stood and squeezed an accordion till it squealed. The crowd rose and began buzzing softly about the room.

The boy with the halo and the golden curls was standing now, in the manner of youths, rocking himself eagerly with one knee still propped on the pew, staring at Mya. She stared back. The boy looked to the man with the cane. He nodded at the boy and turned his attention to Mya as well.

Mya took a step forward, then thought better of it, and stepped back again, leaning against the door. The tall man picked up his cane and made his way down from the pulpit. In a moment, he was towering over her, tall, thin, and white.

She looked at his pointed black shoes, and began the long journey up over his pinstriped pants, gray shirt, and suspenders, to his tailored black jacket and, at six feet one inch, she stopped at his eyes. They were slanted cold wounds that pierced her. His long face with those sunken cheeks and painted lips gave her the same thought she’d had the night before, although she didn’t recall it, some kind of vampire fag. He nodded at her, a decisive, Victorian nod.

“Welcome to our house.” She noted a bit of a lisp on the end of the word house. He raised his hand and gestured slowly toward their surroundings. “This is The Fire House.” Mya swallowed hard. “My name is Ivan.”

The boy came skipping up beside him. His halo bounced as he came. “Hello,” he said brightly, extending his hand. “I’m the archangel Gabrielle. What’s your name?” The sleeves of his white robe hung loopingly from his wrist. Mya did not extend her hand in return.

Ivan slanted his eyebrows like two arrows straining against the bow. “Do you know where you are?”

“Am I in New York City?” she asked, her voice quivering through the words.

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Ivan nodded thoughtfully and leaned forward on his cane. “Yes. I suppose in the current contingent of time, space, and all that, you are. You are indeed in New York City, my dear.”

Another man, also in a pinstriped suit, came up behind them, tapping Ivan on the shoulder. “I just wanted to tell you, it was a terrific service, as always. John Ashfruit’s interpretation was hilarious, don’t you think?” Ivan nodded. Gabriel stepped to the other side of Ivan, keeping his expectant eyes on her. The man in the ball-cap turned to Mya, extending his hand. She held hers out reluctantly.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”

“No,” Ivan answered for her, “you wouldn’t have. She just came in last night, during the storm.” He nodded meaningfully.

The man in the hat smirked, but his eyes flashed a look that appeared accusing to her. “Ah, where from? Are you an artist?”

She swallowed hard. What had she stumbled into? Her head was pounding from a whiskey hangover, general confusion, and, although she didn’t know it, a slight concussion. “I . . . I don’t think so,” she answered meekly.

“What do you mean, you don’t think so? You mean you don’t know where you’ve come from or you don’t know if you’re an artist?” People were humming behind him, small conversations moving in circles about the room. He caressed his gray goatee and wrinkled his bushy brows. “Do you make art or not? It’s a simple question.” He cocked his head sideways, his forehead furrowing with aggressive curiosity.

Mya lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “Yeah, I don’t know.”

Ivan’s face showed no emotion whatsoever. The angel boy had taken to twirling around them. Her inquisitor let out one hard cackle. “She doesn’t know!” he boomed. “Priceless. I love it.” He looked back to her as if she were some weird ornament on display before him. “Let’s try it another way, what do you do? You have a very interesting look.” She stared blankly back at him. “I mean, what are you?”

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Her eyes widened. “No one’s ever asked me that before.”

The man shook his head no quickly, confounded. There was a horrible silence of two beats. He turned and addressed Ivan as if she was no longer there. “Your hospitality is limitless,” he hissed.

“Always taking in the wayward soul, aren’t we?” He looked to the twirling boy. “Where do you find them?”

Ivan smiled softly and bowed his head, “I don’t find them. They find me.”

“Lucky you.” The man squeezed Ivan’s elbow. The archangel Gabriel stopped twirling. “I’ll be in touch about the donation.” He headed back into the waning crowd.

Mya felt paralyzed. It was all she could muster to crack out, “Do you got my stuff ?”

Ivan raised an eyebrow. “Yes, we got it. Hmmm.” He took a key out of his pocket and handed it to Gabriel. “We washed what was washable. I hope that’s all right. Will you take her to the laundry room and give her her things?”

Gabriel reached around her and took hold of the doorknob.

She stepped aside. “Follow me. I’ll show you around.” He smiled up at her, his hazel eyes twinkling, his halo bouncing above his curls.

Ivan watched him skip through the doorway, out of sight. For years, Ivan had kept himself in the most upright positions. He appeared as a monument frozen to the core, unmoving, unmoved, stiff. He was a man who knew how to say no, and reveled in it. He was a man who knew how to instill boundaries and enforce them.

The area about him was roped off with silk ribbons, and tourists may gaze longingly at the elegant statue, but they didn’t dare step into its forbidden perimeter.

Yet this weird boy had a terrific and mysterious effect on him.

From the moment he saw him, Ivan could not turn Gabriel down, could not turn him away, could not turn him out or turn him in.

When Gabriel first walked through the door one crisp, spring Sunday morning, Ivan had known immediately that this boy was Track Eight: Building a Mystery

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meant for him, the way a person knows that one stray dog is theirs and another not.

Gabriel had filed in with the rest of the congregation and sat in the back row in the pew nearest the door. His jeans were too large for his thin body, hanging down past his hips when he stood, and bubbling up around his waist, where they might hit an old man, when he sat. His shirt was too small for him: a blue T, broadcasting an image of Mighty Mouse in zooming flight, which crept up to his ribs every so often.

Ivan kept a close eye on him from the pulpit as he read the story that every member of the congregation had come to know so well.

When that day’s author took the stand, Ivan kept turning about to check and make sure he hadn’t left. He hadn’t. He was waiting for the concessions.

When the service was over, Gabriel had slinked over and quietly hovered about the table where complimentary wine, cheese, and crackers sat spread for the taking. Ivan watched him cram mouthfuls then hang his head low and chew, quickly swallowing before reaching for another giant helping of hors d’oeuvres. The patrons milling about the table pretended not to notice. Gabriel actually thought his clandestine operation was going quite well, until, on the third mouthful, he felt that cold, skeletal hand land on his shoulder. He turned his head up, his cheeks bulging like a chipmunk’s from an un-swallowable portion. Ivan handed him a glass of wine. He washed the mush down with a heavy gulp and grimace. “Come with me,” was all Ivan had said.

Gabriel remembered how lost he’d felt at first. The cold empty corridors of the old church, although the manifestation of his ultimate fantasy, were unfamiliar, and a lonely playground for a thirteen-year-old boy, even if he was the most devout of angels.

Ivan did everything he could to make Gabriel feel at home. He presented him with the robe as well as numerous costume angel wings and halos. And now, instead of a crummy wall full of postcards, he had a whole sanctuary of the most gorgeous stained 486

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Seraphim smiling down at him that he could visit any time. Ivan fed him, schooled him, and encouraged him to live as he wished.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” Ivan had told him. “This is the distinguishing power man has on this earth,” Ivan had told him, “the power to imagine and the power to actualize his truest desires.”

Ivan did his best to make a home for Gabriel, but his care had vast limitations. He was a frigid and serious man who could hardly speak except of the largest ideas and most weighty philosophies.

Things like play, hugs, and kisses seemed unknown to him, and even the touch of his thin fingers felt like something dead offering consolation.

Although she had been awful, Gabriel missed his mother desperately. More than ever in his life, he ached for the affection of a friend. The night he helped Ivan drag Mya to her room, his heart had nearly leapt out of his chest at the prospect of having a second warm body living with them, at the thought of having someone who could talk about things besides rooms full of fire and the nature of “man’s true will.” He wanted to do everything he could to ensure that she would stay, at least for a while.

That first day, when Ivan took her into his office to have a talk with her, Gabriel prayed to his angels that Ivan would let her live with them. bookshelves made up the four walls of his dark office. Ivan sat Mya down in the cushioned chair across from his mahogany desk, lit a cigarette and reclined, regarding her with pretentious speculation. “Gabriel fed you? You’ve changed into some dry clothes, I see.”

She nodded and fidgeted with the hem of her skirt. He ashed his cigarette in the silver tray on the corner of his desk. “He seems to have taken a liking to you very quickly.” She nodded again. They said nothing for several minutes. She looked around the room, noticing she was surrounded on all sides by books. He interrupted

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the silence. “So, where are we coming from? Where are we going to?”

“We?” “You my darling,” he tried again. “Where have you come from?”

“The ocean.”

“Come again?”

“I been on a boat. They let me off at the dock last night.”

“Ah, I see. Thank goodness. Housing an angel and a mermaid would be too absurd, even for me.”

“Housing? You offerin me a place to stay?”

He took a long drag of his cigarette and exhaled. “We’re going too fast. Let’s start over.”

“Whatever floats your boat.”

He looked directly above her and spoke to the bookshelf. “I run a nonprofit arts organization. Although my mission is one of a philosophical and cerebral pursuit, purely an artistic and intellectual endeavor, you may have noticed we are sitting inside a church.

I am not a charitable man, by nature. Unfortunately, the nuns who leased the building to me have contractually obligated me to altruism.”

Mya chewed the inside of her mouth and squinted, leaning forward and picking at the top of her boot. She felt for the handle of the knife. Ivan let his gaze skip around the room leisurely as he continued speaking, thinking aloud more than he was talking to her. “The question of rational self-interest is more complex than one might think. Left to my own devices, I have no reason to offer house and home to any wayward soul who wanders in. But if you put the matter of my own shelter on the line, which the previous owners did, believing it was in their own self-interest to enforce continued charity, as they believe they will be rewarded for it in heaven,” he let his hand sweep through the air, alluding to heaven, “then it becomes a different matter entirely. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules and contingents.”

She pinched the knife handle between her finger and thumb, 488

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just in case. She didn’t know what he was saying, so she felt she should be prepared for whatever was coming. “Your posture is appalling,” he told her, noticing her strange lean. “Young lady, you are going to seriously damage your figure if you keep that up.”

“What’re you trying to say to me?” she asked, roughly. “What rules and continents?”

He extinguished his cigarette in the tray and sat upright, facing her. “Do you have any family here? Any friends? Any friends of family? Any family of friends?” She straightened up and shook her head no. “Tell me this then, why did you come here? Where were you planning on staying?”

She shrugged. “I just wanted to see the city. I thought I could hold up in the big park if I needed to, for a few days at least, till I found somewhere to be.” Ivan clasped his hands and leaned his head on his chin, watching her thoughtfully. She swallowed hard and wiggled in the chair.

“Do you have any skills, any job prospects?”

She looked about herself, tiring of the questions. “I’m good on a horse and I’m good with balls,” she said shortly. “What is it y’all do here anyway? You keep saying art, but I don’t see no art. You paint?”

“No.” “What do you do?”

“What you saw this morning.”

“The weird church?”

“Yes, well, it’s more of an alternative to church.” He watched her face. “Instead of church. I hold a reading and lecture series every Sunday morning. It’s not church, but we do study a Bible story, one in particular, interpreted through contemporary poetry and prose, philosophy, sometimes even live music, and once we had an interpretive dancer.”

“I did that before.”

“What?”

“That kind of dancing. I did that to a song by a woman named Bessie Smith.”

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“I just adore Bessie Smith.”

Mya nodded.

“We’ve gotten off topic,” he told her, pulling open the desk drawer and taking out a form. “So, as far as I can see, if you do wish to stay here, I can allow it, but two weeks is all I can promise.

It will be a probationary period, do you understand?”

“Like I’m in jail?”

“No. No. Just a time to see if you can follow the rules and that everything is working out, then after two weeks, we will reevaluate, excuse me, make a second decision about how long this situation will last.”

“Oh. What’re the rules?”

“Simple. On Sundays you assist with the service in whatever way is needed. You’ll be a volunteer.”

“But I have to, though, right?”

“Oh. Well yes. You have to volunteer in order to stay. Moving on, two days a week you have cleaning duty and that means mopping the sanctuary, the room where we hold our services, two bathrooms, your own room, and the kitchen, as well as washing linens and dishes. You got that? Yes, all right, furthermore there is no smoking in the main sanctuary and nothing is to be removed from that sanctuary. The door leading out shall remain locked at all times and you are not allowed any guests under any condition, even in the daytime. Understood? Yes. All right. You can help yourself to food, but don’t go crazy. And I do want to add, this is a temporary setup. The goal is to leave. Understand? This is in no way to be thought of as a permanent situation. It’s charity, a roof over your head until you can provide that for yourself.”

“Okay. That’s it?”

He thought about it. “Yes, that’s it. You still want to stay here?”

“I guess I ought to.”

“I need you to sign this form and, if I could, see a copy of your identification.”

“I don’t got one.”

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“Did you lose it?”

“I never had one.”

“That should be corrected immediately, but in the meantime, sign this.” Mya took the pen. Her hand hesitated a moment.

“It’s stating that you’re a guest and relinquish all rights as a tenant . . . that if I tell you to leave, you have to leave, basically,” Ivan explained. But she wasn’t hesitating over that. She was trying to decide what name to sign. after relinquishing all of her rights as a tenant, which she didn’t know she had in the first place, so it didn’t feel like she had relinquished much, Mya decided to go and see the great city that rested beyond the church walls. As soon as she turned the corner, she held it in her gaze. Making her way block by block, she made sure to keep sight of it as it disappeared then reappeared between streets and buildings, growing ever more looming above her. The Empire State Building. As her mother had told her so many times, at the top of the world, feeling free up there, viewing the whole extent of civilization and the ocean curving around the Earth. It looked awful tall, taller than anything she’d ever seen.

Something in her heart still rang with a hope that she knew Idrissa thought she’d abandoned for callousness. She crossed her fingers and wished. If she looked hard enough, she knew, she would be able to see her Aryan from up there.

She didn’t need to ask directions. It had grown larger until there it was right there in front of her. Endlessly, people bustled past her and into the impressive doorway. The cement awning bore the etched number 350, and above that, two columns shot straight up, encasing the words embedded in gold, EMPIRE STATE, an American flag crowning it all. But that was only the base. When she craned her head back, it looked like it was falling on her. The needle point seemed to pierce the sky through a low-hanging white cloud on this bright blue day.

She caught a space between the streaming crowd and let herself

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be carried along through the doors. She felt the perfect seventytwo-degree air hit her and smelled the sterilized corridor. Once in, the people were forming another line, digging in their purses and prodding their wallets, handing money to a man behind a window.

She figured that wasn’t for her and broke away, continuing in the direction of the distant eleveators. A large arm caught her stomach and a guard’s voice boomed, “Ticket? ID.” She stepped back, away from his holding arm, “Ah, nah. I’m just goin up to the top.”

“That’s right? Well, that’s twenty-five dollars. You got a ticket, princess?”

She gave him a scowl. He was smiling down at her in amusement that was also mocking. His black cheeks looked like little balloons below his laughing eyes. He was a large man shaped like Santa Claus. “Twenty-five dollars? You got to be kidding!” she howled.

He let out a hiss and pointed to a sign corroborating his assertion.

“Jeeeez,” she moaned. “I just want to go up and look out.”

“You and half the world, hunny. It’s twenty-five. That’s the fee to see.”

“Aw, fine.” She dug in her bag and produced three ten dollar bills. “I guess I gotta spend something sometimes.” She held the money up to the guard. He leaned away in disbelief then burst out laughing.

“You’re lucky I’m feeling nice today, or I’d take that.” He shook his head. “You don’t give it to me,” he said loudly so that the female guard across the hall looked over at them. He pointed at Mya. “She’s trying to pay me!” He shouted to the female guard, laughing. The other guard shook her head. “Maybe I should take it as a tip for doing my job so good and stopping you,” he told Mya. He grabbed the top of her head like she was a little kid, and turned it toward the line. “See all those other people there waiting. You go stand like everybody else, cause you aint no better than everybody, hunny. You might think you’re special. You aint that special. So go stand in line, and then you give that nice man your money, and 492

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show him your ID and then you can do whatever you want. Okay?

Is it a deal, sweetheart?” He patted her on the back, releasing her, but she didn’t budge.

“Whatdya mean my ID? I aint got no ID.” He raised an eyebrow. “Damn girl, where you coming from?

You aint dressed that way on purpose, huh?”

“What?”

“You’ve got to show your ID to get in here.”

“Why? I just wanna go look off the top.”

“This is New York City. We don’t take no chances. For all we know, you might be a goddamned terrorist.”

“Huh? ID and twenty-five bucks just to go on top of a building and look out?” Her heart was pounding with anger and frustration building up from her chest. “You-uns are crazy.”

“You gonna give me trouble? You either gotta get a ticket or get out, kid. I can’t let you go this way.”

“Can’t you just not tell?”

He shook his head, no. His neck was getting tired. “You gotta go.

You keep arguing with me, you’re gonna get the real police over here.” He placed his hand on her shoulder and pointed. “It’s back out that door with you.”

His hand was large and heavy on her. Many people were staring at them from the line where they stood waiting. They didn’t look human. They looked like deer. She took a deep breath and took a step toward the door, then another, then another, her stomach in her throat, her feet heavy as lead. She exited the building without ever having seen the world from above.

She stood on the street staring up at it and tried to talk herself out of the dejected state she’d fallen into. Some other day, she told herself. There’s enough else in this city to see, anyway. Who needs to go look off a roof, anyway? She tried her best not to be horribly upset, but it was a bad, bad start. She went on back the way she came, deciding to take herself on a tour at ground level, and keep her head up. She expected to float through the impressive Track Eight: Building a Mystery

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streets of sparkling buildings, crashing into one terrific adventure after another. Instead, she spent an hour walking the streets like a frightened cat. The crowds of people seemed intent on running her down at every turn. When she darted into a gift shop to get some rest from the tumult, the shop owner watched her too hard for anyone’s comfort. She could tell he thought she was a thief and she ambled awkwardly around the store under his gaze, knowing she couldn’t afford to buy anything.

The bars were where things were happening, where people stopped long enough to speak to each other, where live music, dancing, and performances were taking place on every corner during the evening. But she wasn’t able to get into any of them, because she had no identification. She was forcefully turned away even from the roughest venues, and finally found her way to a park, but that also was completely inhospitable to a young woman alone.

She had the sensation of having been chewed through the gears of some awful machine. She slinked back to the church just after midnight, feeling utterly rejected, spit out from the finicky mouth of the city that did not even seem like a city to her, but rather some monstrosity whose workings she had no idea how to navigate She dragged herself back in, a defeated thing, locked the door behind herself and went to the small gray room whose severe emptiness mirrored the cold that had crept into her chest. She lay on the bed, her eyes wide, holding back tears, wondering with disbelief at the choices she had made that now left her alone and lost in such an alien territory. How was it she’d given up so suddenly and easily the things she’d loved most dearly, again and again?

What was this burning inside always propelling her forward, but toward nothing? And not only toward nothing, but away from everything that was something to her and toward nothingness, she thought, toward complete desolation. Was this her last stop, the last place, the last moment where she would finally be destroyed? She remembered the smell of her mother’s hair and the warmth of her father’s embrace. These memories swept over her like hell, because 494

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they were now such sheer illusions. Her eyes filled with tears as she let herself become full of the feeling that there was no one left who would reach for her with love. She’d fed her own mother to a beast and everyone else she’d either run off or run away from. Here she was now, where she’d always known she would be, a transient imbecile of no value to this world, subsisting upon the charity of others. She smashed her hands into her eyes, but before that first hiccupping sob could make its way out of her throat, there was a knock at the door.

She sniffled and wiped the tears away. “Who is it?”

The door creaked open just enough for him to poke his head through, silver halo preceeding. She sat up. He looked smaller than he had that morning. His eyes also were red from crying. He kept them down to the ground, speaking softly. “Do you think I could sit in here for a while? I . . . I heard something, something that sounded like screaming.”

“It’s an old building is all.”

“Oh, all right.” He started to back out.

“Come on in, but close the door behind ya,” she croaked. “And lock it. I thought that thing was locked. You just knock then open it without waiting for an answer?”

“Sorry.” He stepped in and closed the door, carefully locking it behind himself. He looked around the room. There was no chair.

Mya sat on top of the covers, still fully dressed with her big black boots on. He chewed on the bottom of his lip and waited with the pensive air of a frightened child, because, she realized, that is exactly what he was. His vulnerability and frail size were exacerbated by the ridiculous halo, robe, and white feathery costume wings he was wearing. She thought it looked like an actual divine visitation as he stood at the end of her bed, his eyes puffed strawberries, his hands politely clasped in front, waiting for her to give him some direction.

She pulled the covers down. “I’m tired, angel. Get in if yer stayin.”

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He silently took off his wings and laid them on the table by the door then crawled into bed next to her. She pulled the covers up.

He turned on his side and watched her. “You sleep in your boots?” he asked.

“You sleep in your halo?”

“Sometimes. You sleep in a tutu?”

“Always. You sleep in a robe?”

He chuckled. “I’m an angel. What are you?”

She punched her pillow down pressed her head against it.

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“You look like a baby. Ivan adopt you or something?”

Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. “No. I guess not.”

“What, he kidnapped you then? Are you kidnapped?”

“No.” He rolled over on his back. A light was coming in from the small window above the bed. “I’m not kidnapped or adopted.

I’m just staying.”

“Just staying? Aint your parents gonna call the cops or something?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know.” He thought about it. “Probably not. My mom won’t want the police around.”

“How long you been here?”

“A while. Months.”

“You like it?”

Gabriel nodded. “Sure.”

“Aren’t you going to have to go to school?

“Ivan’s teaching me things. He makes me study all of the time.

But I don’t mind. I like reading and he gives me lots of books.”

“What kinds of books?”

“All kinds of books. He’s teaching me Greek. I’ve already read most of the myths. But he gave me Inferno and also made me read almost the whole Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and the Arabian Nights.”

She squinted and shook her head. “The Bahadawhat?”

“It’s the Hindu’s religious book.”

“Like, from India?”

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“Yeah.”

“I know about that. Why does he want you to read all those?”

Gabriel’s eyes widened. He rolled over onto his side, resting his head on his arm “Ivan’s a genius, you know?”

“I doubt that.”

“No. He figured out that there’s only one story. He says all of these stories in the world are just one story told over and over again in different ways. That’s what his services are, ‘The House of Fire.’

He has different, like, famous people come in every week and interpret it in new ways.”

“What story?”

“The story of fire, of escape from the fire. Of two becoming three, of three becoming four inside the fire, the story of surviving the fire. That’s why it’s called ‘The House of Fire.’”

“His church, you mean?”

“It’s a nonprofit arts organization. That’s how he makes his money. Rich people give him money to do it.”

“Doesn’t nonprofit mean no money?”

“I don’t know.” Gabriel sighed. “That’s what he always says.”

“This place is fucking weird.” She sat up on her elbow. “You go to the fire church every Sunday?”

“Yeah. You have to, too. It’s the rule.”

She cocked her head. “I don’t have to do nothing. Just you remember that. And be careful of religious folks. They can be crazy. I’m glad you like Ivan, but don’t let him take over your head. You need to have your space in your own mind, got it?”

“Oh.” She laid back down with a heavy plop. “I’m goin to sleep. Just so you know, I aint no angel. I’m real mean and I got weapons in places you never even thought of, so don’t get no ideas, little boy.”

“Oh.” Gabriel curled into a ball, facing her. She closed her eyes.

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“What?” she asked meanly, opening one eye and shooting it sideways.

“Can I hold your hand while we sleep?”

“What did I just say?” she snarled.

“Oh.” He pulled his knees up to his chest and shut his eyes tight.

Sometime later, when the sun was just rising, she woke briefly, finding him strung out all over her, his head on her shoulder, his halo tangling in her hair, his arm flung up across her face, and his leg resting over her thigh. She tried to move him off but he was a clinging dead weight. She damned God a few times under her breath, “I never asked for no goddamned half-grown baby to be taking care of.” But she finally resigned herself and fell back to sleep, and when she woke again, it was late morning and he was gone.

The next night was the same, and the night after that. Just as she was getting into bed, regular as a heartbeat, she heard him meekly tapping at the door. He waited for an answer. She shouted out, “Come in if you’re coming.” He came in, placed his halo and wings on the side table, and crawled into bed with her. In the morning, when she woke, he was gone. on friday morning , she found Ivan standing outside her door.

He was staring off into space and she had the feeling he’d been waiting there a long while, without ever having thought of knocking on the door or calling her. When she stepped out, he blinked out of his trance and directed his exacting gaze down upon her. He was so tall, thin, and stiff, she felt that she need only touch him with the tip of her finger, and he would fall like a chopped tree, his top creating a perfect arc from the sky to he ground. He held his hands in front of him, his thin fingers clasped like teeth. The way his chin came to a point, his starched gray dress shirt, and black suspenders reminded her of a gothic villain in an illustrated children’s book.

“We’re sleeping late today,” he said as a greeting. She felt this statement was an effrontery, and gave him no response other than a wrinkled forehead. “How are you enjoying your stay?”

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She shifted her weight. “I did my cleaning duty yesterday, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“No, no. I know that. You did a very good job. You’re a natural maid.”

She looked down and kicked the toe of her boot at the floor.

It squeaked on the marble. “You come to give me compliments?”

He pursed his lips into something resembling a smile. “Do you have some free time now? Are you free?”

She nodded. “I guess.”

“Walk with me.” He took his cane from where it leaned against the wall and began to stroll slowly across the sanctuary, his third step echoing up to the painted angels. She followed at his side.

“Gabriel has been spending a lot of time with you, I hear.” He glanced down at her. She lifted her shoulders and dropped them.

“You’re becoming friends?” She shrugged again and sighed deeply.

“He’s very young, you know?” Ivan kept on. “He’s very young, and very impressionable. There are things he might not understand yet, things about women, I mean. Do you understand?”

“I understand things about women,” she said shortly. Her head felt heavy, like it was being filled with a thick liquid metal swimming around her brain. It was his intense looking that did that.

“How old are you?”

“I’m more than legal for everything,” she snorted.

“Listen, this is obviously a different situation. I like things this way, unorthodoxed. I open up my home to strangers, to the strangest of strangers, even. This is the fuel of art and how I choose to live . . .”

“I thought you said it was because of the nuns,” she interrupted him.

“Whatever the reason, my point is, unorthodoxy comes with certain risks. Of course it does. It must. But some risks are greater than others. Some, when weighed on the scale of cost benefit analysis, I think we might find are not, as they say, worth it.”

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however unfamiliar, was the whole of the city for her, thus far.

This building with its echoing walls was a small world she felt capable of navigating, whose language she felt she could learn to speak, at least for the moment, insulating her from the larger world looming outside, threatening to devour her with its incomprehensible tongue. New Orleans had been fine. It was a city of people, of humans whom she could communicate with, whose landscape she could navigate. She’d been too cocky about New York. In the few days she’d been there, she’d only really seen the city once. Other days she’d ventured no further than the corner of the block, where she stood and watched the silent people rushing, never glancing sideways, each, it seemed, moving toward something of the greatest urgency. She did not feel that she was in a city of humans, but that she’d landed on an alien planet full of beings to whom she was completely invisible. It was similar to an experience one might have when faced with the vastness of the universe. Each time she stepped out the door and saw the magnificent buildings looming above, extending into the vast expanse, she felt herself to be the most insignificant and impotent speck of inconsequential matter fallen upon the lash of some giant that should, at any moment, wipe her from off its eye.

“Look, you got nothing to worry about. Gabriel’s just sleeping with me. That’s all.” They had crossed the whole of the sanctuary.

Ivan planted his cane on the marble floor and stood, momentarily struck speechless, his lips parted a half inch, his breath stuck there.

“I mean, we’re just sleeping together,” she tried again. “He’s sharing my bed.” Ivan turned and stared down at her, his face blank.

“He scared of sleeping alone is all.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“He thinks this place is haunted.”

“He’s never mentioned that to me.”

“I don’t know. He says he hears a ghost cryin at night, or moaning or something. I told him it’s an old building. It’s creaking its cricks out. But anyway, he comes on and gets in bed with me. Says 500

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he can’t sleep otherwise. I told he’s just being a big baby, but it don’t make no matter with him.”

She noticed Ivan’s flesh growing a shade paler than its already sheet-like veneer and momentarily become a near silvery gray.

“Oh. I see. Yes. I see. Well, children you know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” He coughed and looked away. “Thank you for consoling him.” He waved his hand in the air, wiping away the conversation. “This isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh.” He swiveled around on his cane and tilted his head upward, admiring the angel above them. The cherub’s cheeks puffed as it blew a trumpet emitting a fluffy white cloud from the bell. “You’ve been here five days now, and you haven’t left once, have you?”

He’d finally managed to embarrass her.

“I went out a couple times.”

“How far did you get in school?”

The question was abrupt and the overall inquisition was shocking to her senses. Something deep in her trembled and she wanted out, even if it meant having to face the bowels of the urban monstrosity beyond the door, she wanted out. Her expression fell down to hell. She swallowed the lump and took a step back, away from him. “Whatdya want from me? Did I do something wrong? I been following all your rules.”

“Yes, you have. Definitely. But we did say that this was a temporary situation. You’ve been here five days and you haven’t left once. I suppose you’re not looking for a job? You haven’t met anyone, made any alliances.” He sighed deeply and took a few steps toward the hallway. She resumed walking beside him. “I have a proposition for you. I’m making you an offer you should seriously consider taking advantage of. I’m willing to devote some time out of my week to giving you some schooling, tutelage, just to help you brush up on some basic skills, and when I see where you are, what you can offer, I’m sure I can put you in touch with some people who can give you a job.

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letting your mind go to waste. The mind is capable of so much, and yet there it sits, stagnant and unused in so many heads. A waste is a terrible thing to mind, but I do.” He grinned, pleased with his own joke and tapped his cane loudly. “It will also give me a chance to get to know you better. I have a right to know what kind of person is living under my roof, don’t you agree?”

“Sure.”

“So you accept?”

“Ummm. Yeah. Sure.”

“Terrific.” He turned down the hallway and motioned with his cane toward the stairs. “After you.”

“Right now?”

“No time like the present. Or did you have somewhere to go today?”

Ivan led her up the staircase. She followed pensively behind, to a door that opened to a dark office, the walls lined with books, ceiling to floor. He sat her in the chair opposite his desk, and began quietly pecking at the shelves like a cautious bird, making certain to pluck just the right worm. Mya watched with morbid curiosity.

When his gathering was finished, he held three books in his hand.

“What’re those?” she asked.

“These are your first assignment.” He took some stickers out of a drawer and carefully marked a place in each of the books, then he produced a pen and paper and laid them in front of her. “I’ve marked three very small stories here. You read them, and then I want you to write down briefly the moral you derived from each.

Write down in a couple of sentences what it is you think this story is telling us. This will give some better idea of the level at which we should begin.”

She huffed. “You want me to read all these right now?”

“I’ll leave you alone. You can take all the time you need. They’re very short. I’ll be back in an hour, how’s that?”

She leaned forward, and took the three books into account.

“Hey, that’s the Bible.”

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“Yes. So?” “So, I don’t need to read that one. I already done read the whole Bible, front and back.”

Ivan tapped the desk with his thin finger and forced a grin.

“Well, it can’t hurt to brush up. The second reading always produces a more enlightened interpretation than the first. What do you say, can you humor me for the first assignment?”

She shrugged her shoulders and looked put upon. “That’s the attitude.” He headed to the door. “I’ll see you in an hour, and we’ll discuss.”

He closed the door tight, and she thought she heard the sound of the lock clinking. Her stomach stirred. She decided not to get up to check it, because she knew if she found it so, she would find herself unable to forgive this man, unable not to hate him, and in order to live with him, she needed not to hate him. Perhaps he was right about a few things, after all. As soon as she put her nose down and began reading, all thoughts of being locked in or not left her mind, as she found herself already free, beyond the door and the walls that contained her and even this city that frightened her, transported to his three disparate worlds of fire. The hour passed quickly. She hadn’t even thought to become impatient when he heard the handle twisting, and Ivan entered again with an open bottle of wine in his hand.

“This is leftover from my luncheon,” he told her, motioning to the wine bottle. He made his way to his desk and poured himself half a glass. “Have you finished?” he asked, taking a sip.

“Yep, but like I said. I already read that one about the furnace. I read the Bible when I was little. I done my church time.”

“Fine, and what about the others?”

He stood by the shelf, swirling the tumbler of red wine. “You think I could get some of that?” she asked “I suppose there’s no harm.” He poured her a glass.

“I don’t usually drink this stuff. I’m more of a whiskey girl, myself.”

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“Did you read the others?”

“Yep, all the ones you marked there, even though a lot of it, I gotta say, I didn’t understand.”

“What did you understand?”

“There were lots of words I never heard in that one about the ruined place most of all. But I got it, that they’re all three stories about fire. I got that.” She picked up the topmost book and flipped its pages.

“Did you do the writing assignment?”

She shook her head. “Nah.” “Oh, that’s a pity.” He sat down across from her behind his desk. “Well we can do it now. Just tell me then, a quick analysis of one of the stories. What was the moral? What did it mean to you, you know, what was its point?”

She sucked on the inside of her cheek and thought for a moment. “Can you do one first?”

“All right.” He took a sip of wine and swished it around his pallet before swallowing. “For example, the biblical story, the fiery furnace, which you say you are already acquainted with. The moral of that story is that one must not worship false idols. It speaks against idolatry, and shows that if you hold to your beliefs, your loyalty will make you immune, even to the flame’s tongue. It is a story of alchemy, of three being cleansed by the fire, saved from the fire, because they were true to no one but themselves and the God they believed in.”

She grunted. “Hmmmm. I never thought nothing like that. I always thought it was about how kings are crazy.”

“Excuse me? How do you mean?”

“Well like, the story starts with the king saying he’s gonna kill everybody cause he don’t know what his dreams mean and the psychics can’t tell them. Then Daniel comes and tell him what it means and says God only told him what those dreams mean to save the people from being killed, not cause he cared about the king’s dreams, so much. Then the king brings Daniel and all his friends 504

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to live with him as thanks, without hearing what Daniel said. All he still cared about was his own dreams. Then, later, the king starts worshiping the gold God and says he’s gonna kill anybody who don’t worship his God. Then they don’t, those three guys, Daniel’s friends Shadrac, Mishack, and what’s his name; they don’t worship his God. So he puts them in the furnace, right?”

“Right,” Ivan took another drink of wine and tried to maintain his patience.

“So he puts them in the furnace, but then when Jesus comes and walks with them as like, their fire extinguisher, and then he believes in Jesus, then he goes and says he’ll kill everyone who don’t worship their God now.

“So I always think the story is about how kings never learn and it’s no use to try and teach em. The king just keeps doin the same thing over and over and over, even at the end, he just goes and does the same thing as in the beginning; threatening to kill everybody who don’t worship their God, even though he’s had three different gods in only two pages’ time. Even though God’s been talking straight to him telling him to stop the killing. God’s all around him, saving everybody from his meanness, trying to teach him. But there the king goes on, just like always, threatening to kill everybody just the same.”

A wave of recognition swept over Ivan’s face. He sat his wine glass on the desk and leaned back in the chair, viewing Mya through new eyes. “Did someone tell you that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You came up with this analysis on your own, did you?”

She sucked her tooth. “I might not seem fancy, but I know when I been insulted.”

He nodded. “I apologize. You have a very different way of looking at the story, that’s all.” He drummed his fingers on the desk.

“You have a mind for politics, it seems.”

“Okay.” She took a large gulp of the wine and smacked her lips.

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always taken from it is of a more spiritual and metaphysical nature, but your reading of it is . . .” He lost his words. “Well, this all is very intriguing, let’s continue.”

“You’re the teacher.”

“How about ‘The Circular Ruins’? How did that strike you?”

“That one was harder. I didn’t get a lot of it.”

“Okay, we’ll come back. And the third story?”

She chuckled and lifted the large leather-bound book with the inscription Classic Tales etched in gold leaf on its cover. “This sure is a good-looking book for the ‘Three Little Pigs’ and all that.”

“Of course, you’ve read it. But can you tell me what the moral of that story is?”

“I don’t know how all this is supposed to help me get me a job.”

“You’re thinking too short-term. Just trust me, all right?”

She let out a small burp.

“So, the three little pigs. What does that teach us?”

“Everybody knows that one: bricks are better for building than straw.”

He gasped and clapped his hands. “Very interesting. Very interesting.”

Mya sighed deeply and fidgeted in the seat. “I’m glad you think I’m so interesting.”

“You know, that’s not a common answer either. Most people would say that the moral of that story is that hard work, dedication, and planning for the future, although not much fun, pays off in the end.”

She shrugged. “That too, I guess.”

“But that’s not the main point, you think? Hmm.” He watched her thoughtfully. “You have a very materialistic inclination.” He slanted his eyes. “Communism is a completely unsustainable fantasy. Sometimes it works on paper, but in real life, you’ll find you’ll be deeply disappointed.”

“Okay.” She shrugged again, briskly, fighting off a shudder. His manner unsettled her continuously, partly because of the way he 506

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spoke, rigid and proper, as if he had nothing better to do than formulate polite sentences. He seemed to believe his outdated semantics might be the very thing keeping the universe in any distinguishable order.

He pointed his thin finger at her. “You might very well be leaning toward red without even knowing it. A Leninist perhaps. Let’s hope not Stalin. Maybe Marx.”

“Marx? Like that guy, Karl Marx?”

He cocked his head in surprise. “Yes.” “I know about him. A friend used to read him to me.”

“Ahh. I see. Well, if that’s where your philosophical allegiances lie . . . What’s your opinion on him?”

“He coulda used a shave.” She finished her wine and held her glass out for more.

He took it from her. “He coulda used a shave. Yes. Anything else?”

She sighed heavily, tiring of class. “I don’t know. He was real strict about grammar. I don’t care about it much and my punctuation aint so good, so I guess I’m not a Marxist yet. I don’t really care to be, to tell you the truth. I got bigger fish to fry than what to do with nouns.”

He handed her a full glass. “And what other famous theorists and philosophers have your friends read to you?” he asked, chuckling to himself. “Lacan?” She shook her head no. “Heidegger, Kant, McLuhan? No.” He flipped his hand daintily in the air and kept at the list with a singsong tone. “Bakunin, Sontag, Žižek? He’s been here, you know? No? Not one other? Not even Aristotle? Pity. Well anyway, I would have pegged you for a natural anarchist.”

She stared at the wine and thought about it. “I guess I did read one other one.”

“Oh?” “A friend of mine I come over on the boat with, but she kept going, she said she was an anarchist. She and the others was always reading me these books by Stephen King. I guess that’s their guy.

But that anarchist stuff scared the bejesus out of me.”

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He paused and gave her a dressing down with his gaze. “Are you drunk?”

“Nah.” She took a big gulp, in case he tried to take the glass from her before she got a chance.

“I suppose that’s enough class for today. Tonight I want you to take the other story, ‘The Circular Ruins,’ read it again, and with a pencil, mark all the words you don’t know. Bring it to me tomorrow. We’ll have a vocabulary lesson. Can you do that?”

She hiccupped and nodded, lapping at the bottom half of the wine. “Sure, but I thought you were gonna show me some basics for working and all. I don’t see how these stories are gonna help with that.”

“We’ll see,” he nodded.

“It’s your buck. If it gives you a bang, I guess you got it.” She downed the last drop of the wine and turned the glass over on the desk, then stood and exited, saluting her farewell. The wine began to slide down the side of the glass and was threatening to leave a ring on his mahogany desk, before he scooped it up and quickly wiped away the light residue. she made her way wobbling down the stairs. Gabriel was waiting at the bottom, hopping from foot to foot. He noticed the book in her hand. “You finished your first lesson?” he asked excitedly.

“What are you reading?” She made her way past him, waving the book in the air. He followed eagerly at her side, grabbing at it to get a look. “Ficciones? Oh wow. You’re really advanced. Borges! Wow. Ivan says I’m not even there yet, and I’m way above my age level.

Oh wow. Is it good?”

They crossed the sanctuary floor. Gabriel craned his neck back taking in the angels as one would a clear night sky. “What are you yammering about?” Mya asked. “Looks like you had yer coffee today, huh? Jeez you got it bad. Ivan says this and Ivan says that.”

She mocked his tone. Gabriel slowed, pouting, and shrugged his robed shoulders. Hs wings shrugged with them. Mya opened the

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door to her room. He entered cautiously behind her. She tossed the book on the bed. Gabriel crawled up after it, positioning himself cross-legged and inspected its contents, his eyes widening at the first few words. Mya locked the door and stood for a moment, watching him reading voraciously, as if he’d gotten his hands on a forbidden candy. “You sure do like reading, huh?”

“Yeah. So?” “So, is that cause Ivan or cause you always did?”

He answered without looking up. “I read all the books in my library.”

“All the books? Sheeesh.”

He bit his bottom lip. “Well, a lot of them, anyway.”

Mya pulled one of her two bulging bags out from under the bed. “Gosh, this is the best for you, then. Where better for a bookworm angel than in a church run by a vampire fag calling himself some literature prophet? Hmph.” She turned the bag over, spilling the contents out on the floor. They fell with a clanging and clatter.

Gabriel started and looked up.

“What’s all that?”

“That’s my shit.”

“Oh.” He leaned over the edge of the bed, getting a better look. The heap before him was indeed best categorized as “her shit,” or perhaps, “her crap.” A pile of strange miscellaneous objects, scattered among dust and broken bits of “things”; the miscellaneous objects including but not limited to: nine striped, muticolored balls, several multicolored wires, two breaker boxes, five remote controls, a number of small tools, screwdrivers, a battery-powered drill, wrenches, wire cutters, and the like. Mixed among these also were several large metal concoctions of chains, loops, horseshoes, and copper rings. He hopped down from the bed and scooped one up.

It clanged and chimed as he dangled it in the air.

“What are those balls for.”

“Those balls are for juggling.”

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“You juggle?”

“Sure.” She picked up the balls and tossed three of them in the air. They went in an infinite loop. “Toss me the rest, one at a time.”

“Really? Okay.” He tossed them at her one at a time. She took each one with ease, entering it into the group, until she was the conductor of a tornado of balls, performing little twists and turns in the middle of it all. “Woah! I’ve never seen anyone do that many.”

“It’s not hard. I can show you sometime.”

“What’s this?”

She stopped her tossing and the balls scattered along the floor.

“That’s a puzzle. You gotta get the ring out from those horseshoes.”

He tugged on the ring, but the horseshoes at either end, connected by a looping chain, were too large to fit through the hole.

“That’s not possible. You’re messing with me.”

“Nah, it’s possible. Try it.” She sat down cross-legged beside him along the edge of the clutter. He fidgeted with the puzzle as she watched in silence. His face reddened and he finally began trying to bend the horseshoe with all of his might, groaning as he did so. “It aint brute force how you get it,” she warned him. “Now yer telling me you can read all these fancy books, but you can’t get one little puzzle game?”

“Can you do it?” He held it out to her. “Show me.” She took the puzzle from him and rummaged through the pile of her shit, producing another similar contraption.

“Here, you try this one. It’s easier.” Mya flipped the other puzzle around. It made clanking noises. Gabriel held his, watching her moves, mimicking them with the self-conscious motions of his small hands. “See here,” she told him. “These things take time and patience. But it aint just that. It takes an understanding of things.

You know about domino effects?”

He shook his head no.

“Domino effects is how things go together to make each other possible. Everything’s connected in a certain way see, but when you change the position of one thing, you change what’s possible 510

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for another thing. This puzzle here is a nine-step puzzle. The one you got there, that’s just a two-stepper. But you gotta move everything in a particular order to make it possible for this little loop to go free.

“You figure this notion out, kid, can’t no one ever put you in a cage.” The barbaric looking concoction of metal was changing form before his eyes as she rearranged it. “It aint only puzzles this is good for,” she went on. “You can use energy too to make things happen, shape everything, un-shape things, even. Electricity, chemicals, you re-shape them, they re-shape other things. Hell, you could make an old mousetrap and rearrange a rat, you know what I mean?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. His own puzzle was sitting in his lap.

He was caught up in watching her, mesmerized by the quick, intentional movements of her hands.

“Ivan wants to teach you to speak good and read good, fine. But don’t listen to everything that fool’s telling you. I don’t trust no one needs to have people following them so bad. I heard about some crazy stuff in my time. If he ever tries to get you to drink some Kool-Aid with him, don’t.”

“Okay.”

“You all got me thinking about things I aint thought of in years, like my Bible teaching and church, and all that blast.” The puzzle clinked against itself. “You always been an angel? What started all that?” She eyed him.

“I’ve only known I was an angel for a couple of years. But I guess I always was, I just didn’t know it.”

“Uh huh.”

“Have you always been a gothic ballerina?”

“A, what am I?” He nodded to her black tutu. “Ah, hell kid, it’s just a skirt that I like is all.”

“Oh.” Gabriel shifted his legs. One was falling to sleep. He smacked at it.

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“You got any special angel powers?”

“I’m still figuring them out. I’m learning to be as good as possible.”

Her brow furrowed. “Whatya talking about? Angels aint good.”

“What do you mean? Of course they are.”

“You ever read the Bible?”

“Sure.”

“Angels is the hit men for God. Anytime God a needs a city destroyed, or people killed, or hard news given, he sends an angel.”

She lifted her hand in the air and brought it down to the floor, “Righteous vengeance!” she boomed, impersonating a Southern Baptist minister. “You ready for all that?”

He shrugged. “Ivan says that I am going to be an eccentric. He’s an eccentric, you know? It’s something you can be. It’s not just an adjective.” Gabriel swayed as he spoke, swishing the word “eccentric” elegantly. His wings swished with him, and Mya saw for the first time clearly that an eccentric was probably not the only thing Gabriel was going to be that was both an adjective and a noun.

She chuckled to herself.

“What the fuss are you blasting off about now? You up Ivan’s ass so far you think his shit don’t even smell, you’re so used to it.”

Gabriel leaned in, his eyes sparkling and wide. “Why don’t you like Ivan? He’s been nicer to me than anyone ever has. He’s letting you live here for free.”

She shook her head and gave the puzzle a shake. “He aint just being nice. He wants something from it, I can tell. He’s washing yer brain. Wants to prove something with us. I don’t trust him.”

Gabriel laid his hand gingerly on her knee. “He just wants a family. I’m his family now. You can be too.” Mya gave no response.

“Do you have anyone, anywhere?”

“Aha!” she shrieked, holding the emancipated silver hoop in the air. “What’d I tell ya? I’ve always been good at puzzles.”

“Whoa.” The silver ring shown above them, sunlight glinting off its edges as she turned it, proudly displaying her victory.

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in the morning she woke and decided it was time to give it

another go. She crept out of the church and turned down the street. She held it in her gaze like a beacon for thirty minutes, navigating the dense street traffic, until it was upon her. Once again, she waited in the line outside, which moved more quickly this morning than it had in the afternoon. This time she had an idea.

She waited in line until she got to the window teller. When they asked for her money, she paid it up. They handed her a ticket. She held it in her hand, making the ticket very visible to the guards as she waited to go through the turnstile. “Tickets and ID,” the guard hollered. She held her ticket up waving it and stepped through the turnstile. “Miss, your ID,” the guard told her.

“Yep, right here,” she answered, waving the ticket in her fist.

“That’s your ticket. Where’s your identification?” the guard asked.

It hadn’t worked. It wasn’t much of a plan anyway. She’d hoped they wouldn’t really look. In a moment of panic, she bolted through the gates and toward the elevator whose door was just opening. Another guard caught her by the elbow. She turned her face to his. “What’s the idea?” he asked.

“You’re hurting me,” she squealed, as he tightened his grip on her arm.

“No one gets past me, punk,” he told her, leading her toward the exit and out the doorway. He shoved her onto the sidewalk.

“Try it again and I’ll call the police,” he shouted, slamming the door behind him.

She stood there staring up at it. It looked like it was perpetually falling from this angle. She crumpled the ticket and tossed it aside. The ticket she’d paid for with some of what little money she had. Her face turned bright red and tears streamed down her cheeks. The walk back to the church was much longer than she remembered. when she returned , she found Ivan in the garden, sitting on a

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on his arm. Ivan sat peculiarly straight, stiffened by this slight affection as if it were threatening to press him into suffocation. He was reading from a large book laid open across their laps. The thick foliage and hanging leaves of the tree created a frame around the stone bench, and the birds singing from the trees gave the dandy gentleman and the winged boy the appearance of an altogether otherworldly scene, an image stripped from a strange fresco and breathed into animation. Mya stepped into it, triangulating their oddity.

“Perfect timing. You have caught us at the end of our day’s lesson.”

She folded her arms and leaned against a small wooden fence post. “This sure is some garden.”

Gabriel smiled brightly at her. His feathered wings seemed to tremor. “Heya. You’re gonna do your lesson next?” he asked.

“Going to, Gabriel. Speak the words completely, to their end,” Ivan corrected him.

Mya squinted as Gabriel repeated the sentence properly. What was this man on about, she wondered? Her stomach tightened and she had the momentary sensation that she was being held against her will. It was an illogical thought, but she couldn’t help but see, falling with the light that fell through the leaves of this beautiful garden, translucent cage bars glowing all around her. A small growl rumbled in her throat.

“We’re reading a sonnet,” Gabriel went on happily, “by Shakespeare. We’re at the end. Have you read Shakespeare?” She shook her head no. “Do you want to hear some? I can recite it in the right rhythm now. Did you know he wrote to the rhythm of heartbeats?

Do you want to hear?”

“Sure, kid. Why not.”

Ivan gave over full control of the book. Gabriel sat up straight and read aloud. “Death’s second self, that seals up in all the rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire, that on the ashes of his youth doth lie, as the death-bed whereon it must expire, consumed with that which it was nourished by.”

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As he continued with his recitation, Mya held her pensive stance. Ivan listened, keeping his steely eyes upon her, but also with an expression of pride that hinted at a smile tickling the sides of his mouth.

“Perfectly executed,” Ivan praised when Gabriel finished.

“A-plus for the day.”

“Can I stay for her lesson?” Gabriel asked.

Ivan touched him lightly on the shoulder. “I’m afraid not. Say goodbye.”

Gabriel stood and hugged her goodbye. “See ya later. Have fun,” he told her.

“See you later,” Ivan shouted after him, but he was already skipping away.

Mya plopped down in the metal chair that sat caddy-corner to the stone bench. “I see your language is having an effect on his syntax,” Ivan said, turning his attention to her.

“You raising a little prince, huh?”

“Soon it won’t matter if your language is affecting him. Am I right?”

She cocked her head. “Why’s that, cause yer gonna get me talking like you?”

“Wouldn’t you like that?” Bars of light glowed through the trees. She didn’t respond. “Did you mark the story?”

“Yep.” She produced a small book from the bosom region of her black shirt and handed it to him. “My God. The capacity of the female body never ceases to astound and horrify.” He took the book and flipped open to the story. “You’ve marked, as I instructed, the words in Borges’s story which you are not familiar with?”

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numberless Zend lacerating enclosure crowned miasmal pallid inconsolable impose incoherent The list went on. “This is more than enough to begin.” He laid his pen down. “I’ve something for you. It’s yours to keep.” He held the black leather-bound notebook out to her. “You can do your work in it.”

She stood and took it from him, then sitting down once more, inspected the present he’d given her. The cover was soft black leather. A green ribbon attached to the spine marked the place in between the egg-colored perforated pages. She stared at the list of words that seemed like a foreign language to her, inscribed on the first page of her gift. This “gift” gave her a horrible feeling, as if he’d handed her her own ignorance, beautifully packaged and clearly delineated. The list of unknown words seemed to have a life of its own. She was sure it was watching her, viewing her with a greater level of comprehension than that with which she was able to view it.

“Let’s begin at the top of your page, unanimous; it is pronounced with a hard U, then nan-im-us. Emphasis may be placed on the first syllable . . .”

“I don’t wanna do this.”

“You want to do a different word first?”

“No,” she closed the notebook with a clap. “I don’t wanna do this at all, any of it. I quit. Can I quit or not? This aint part of the rules you first told me for me to be living here and I don’t wanna do this no more.”

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“No more? Well you’ve barely done anything at all,” he snorted.

“That’s enough for me anyhow, I guess.”

“Certainly it’s normal to be resistant. Learning can be hard at first, but I think once you get in the swing of it, you’ll see . . .”

“What do you want from us?” she burst out. There was an apparent rage in her that he found startlingly disproportionate to the scene. “Huh? What do you want from us? You running some kind of weird occult, want to make us your worshipers? Is that it?”

“Nothing of the kind.” He spoke lowly and solemnly. Keeping himself straight, he found his guard and put it up. She was possibly more unhinged than he had given her proper credit of being. He thought he heard a purring sound emitting from her throat. He looked side to side, touching his thumb to his fingertips, thinking of how to proceed. “Has something happened, something that has you upset?”

She cocked her head and directed her answer to the trees above them. “I’ll tell you what happened. Zend happened. That’s what.

What the fuck is Zend? I’ll tell you what; I don’t know, and I don’t care. If I need to know someday in real life, if I bump into Zend and gotta tangle with it, then I’ll know, then. This crap aint gonna help me any, and I’m done.”

“Ahhh. I think I understand.” She shot him an angry glance.

“There’s no shame in not knowing something, my dear. There’s nothing to be ashamed of there. The shame comes after you have been offered the chance of learning and rejected it. Choosing to remain ignorant, that is the only thing to be ashamed of.”

“I aint ignorant and I aint ashamed of shit,” she mumbled.

“Oh, but you are ignorant. And so am I. We are all ignorant of something.” He tilted his head, trying to catch her gaze. This statement had only increased her apparent anger. “You say you will know what Zend is when you’ve had to tangle with it. But you are tangling with it right now, on the page and in your mind, and that is very real. Yet you are unwilling to learn its nature. Tangling with a word is no less real than tangling with the thing itself.

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It is simply happening in a different realm, but it’s no less real.”

“Oh yeah? You rather tangle with a real tiger, or the word tiger, huh? You so smart,” she snapped. “See how far yer smarts gets you there.”

“Tigers? That is an ancient battle. The man and the tiger. Is the tiger dreaming himself a beast, or is the beast dreaming himself human?”

“There you go again. Babbling about that kinda thing.”

“Mya, please. I only want to help you. But if you don’t think you need it, you’re free to go.”

“And I can still stay here if I do?”

“You’re not yet out of your probationary period, of course.”

Her bones rattled. She felt trapped and she hated, more than anything of all, the feeling of being trapped. “So it’s a ransom, then.”

“I said you’re free to go. This is all getting too ridiculous for my taste.” He turned and began collecting his books. “I am simply trying to give you something of value that no one can take away from you. Have you ever had anything like that? Do you know how good it can be to have just one thing of value? It can change your life.”

She shrugged and looked to the side. “I had something once, something that was all mine and nothing else like it in the world.

A real inheritance.”

“What happened?”

“Same thing that happens to everything in this world. It went to shit.”

“That’s very bleak.” He felt he was beginning to make headway. He laid the books on his lap. “But education is different even than an inheritance. No one can ever take away your mind. That is the only thing that is wholly your own, and your most valuable resource. An education will never leave you, like everything else seems to have done. And maybe, once you are educated, other things will begin to stay. Have you ever wondered why it was everything else has gone?”

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the right chord. She was thinking of Idrissa, how she’s lost him, how he’d looked at her as an ignorant person he was ashamed to love. “That’s what I’m talking about,” she told him. He nodded.

“You just can’t let things go! I know how to let things go. What is it that’s in this for you? What’re you doin to that little boy? You aint just educatin him. Not really. Not anything normal. Don’t think I don’t see you, cause I see right through you.” His skin prickled.

“Everything you teach is about the same thing. What’s with this fire stuff ? Even that poem you had him reading today is fire stuff. It’s something you got in you bad.”

“Your tone is out of line.”

“Maybe. But I aint wrong.”

It occurred to him that he was dealing with someone whose emotions lacked a logical course. One moment she was defending herself, the next joking, the next calling him out as a metaphysical conspirator. He sighed loudly, then laughed it off. “Fine, I admit it.

I am preoccupied. But it’s no secret. I’ve built an institution around my preoccupation. Your accusation is weightless and absurd.

There’s no harm in my fixation. Some of our greatest art comes out of obsession.”

She stared at him in silence. Even through her stillness, he sensed an ever-present shifting inside of her. “Mya, you’re not alone in losing. Everyone has lost. It’s no good to sit around feeling sorry for yourself, pushing your disappointment with yourself onto others, making yourself the victim.”

“Oh yeah? What’ve you lost, fancy pants?”

“I’ve lost an inheritance as well.”

“Right. You hide your money somewhere, didn’t remember where you put it?”

“No. I lost a factory. My father owned a factory and when he passed, I took it over.”

“So. What happened? It go out of business? Big woop. At least you got a whole big thing. Aint like you lost things that love you back.”

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He smiled and shook his head. “No. No. First of all, it didn’t go out of business. It was a tragedy. The factory was located in Thailand. I lost it due to the flooding from the tsunami. You heard of that, I assume? Anyhow, that was a loss.” He choked on the words. His fingers found their way to the handle of his cane which was carved as a lush treetop. “That was a manageable loss. You’re so young. You’re lucky. The smallest things seem profound to you right now. You don’t know how grief can creep into you and mangle you from the inside. How it can threaten the serenity at the core of your soul if you do not take hold of it and find a proper outlet for the pain. How it can grow into a passion that, if you do not let it defile you, will come to define every inch of you.” He clenched the handle tighter.

She was watching him and listening intently now. “I think I know what ya mean.”

A small laugh bubbled through his lips. “How could you? You’re only a young girl. You should be happy to have so much life ahead of you. My life is behind me. This person you see before you here is only a strange ghost of the man who once was, acting out a weird play as if it were his life. But it’s not. It’s an existence, an artisan recreation, a pantomime of existence.

“The loss of the factory was manageable. The water took my livelihood. But fire took my life.”

“Fire? What fire?”

“All fire is the same fire, as all stories are the same story.”

“There you go again.”

He nodded. “One of my employees, a man who hated me, and who had been trying, for nearly a year, to turn all of my other employees against me through slander and gossip . . .”

“Why would he wanna do that?”

Ivan gave her a knowing look. “He didn’t approve of my lifestyle. Many parts of the world are not as accepting, you see, as we are here.” He looked to the tree fidgeting its leaves in the wind.

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other institutions offered, well above. They were grateful to have the work.

“Anyway, that was only his excuse, the coward. Completely ridiculous. People think they are owed everything when they have worked to build nothing, taken no initiative of their own.” He shook his head, his lips pursing in disgust. “The machismo of the islander is not something to be taken lightly. They have no understanding of alternative lifestyles except through the religious view, as something bestial. They are the ones who are bestial. What they understand is making babies, keeping their women down, and settling their disputes through the most base acts of violence. An effeminate man must watch his step. I underestimated the effect we had on them.”

“We?” “My lover and I. After the flood, everything was a complete disaster. My small house there, in which I lived part of the year, was in a neighborhood that was mostly untouched. But this man, this employee of mine, thought he would take advantage of the general chaos. As we lie sleeping in our bed, just two nights after the flood, he set fire to my house. I barely made it out alive, and this leg will never be right. But Henry, my partner, he wasn’t so lucky.

“I wish I’d died in that fire with him, sometimes. Sometimes I think I did.”

The sparrows went on with their song. A small breeze continued to rattle the garden. “What happened to the guy who done it?” Mya asked.

“He’s rotting in jail, as well he should. I saw to that. I’d have had him done away with completely if there was enough evidence.”

His face reddened and his grip on the cane tightened. Then, as if waking from a daydream, he looked around himself and to the mess of a girl sitting before him. “I’m sorry. I’ve gone on. Why is it, I wonder, I’ve told you all of this?”

She plucked at her hair, fidgeting. “It’s all right. I called you out on it.” She was solemn and calm, struck by his outpouring of emotion.

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“I suppose people must tell you all sorts of things? It’s so easy to tell you. You have no power. That’s probably it, what makes it easy to confide. You’re like a blank slate. You have no power in this world yet, so it doesn’t matter if you know. You must have heard all sorts of wild things from people feeling they can open up to you.”

He positioned his cane on the ground and stood with some effort, his back bent slightly under the weight of shame. “I suppose it goes without saying you shouldn’t repeat this.” He collected his books under his left arm. She stared up at him. He was trembling all through and his face had flushed with embarrassment. He nodded and turned away, leaving her there in the garden, the sound of his cane along the cobblestone growing faint.

“no power. no power.” The words had gotten into her like a poisoned bite and kept working her insides raw. She’d sat in the garden for quite a while, taking in the trees and feeling his words stinging through her. She’d sat and listened, given him an ear and even sympathy, which he’d repaid by smacking her in the face with a backhanded insult, because he felt exposed. She remembered what Jules had said about rich people. She wanted to add to it, when you tell them your story, you give them an unloaded gun, when they tell you yours, they have all the ammunition. She was glad he still knew so little about her. But he was a person who had power over her and who now felt vulnerable with her. She knew that could come to no good end.

She left the church for an hour, to go down the bodega on the corner and purchase a pack of cigarettes, which she stood and smoked, leaning against a brick building, watching people pass on the walk. The few who noticed her, eyed her with looks that were a sickening mix of startlement and pity, that only reinforced Ivan’s venomous words. She saw herself in their eyes, the black tutu, the boots, the hair that jutted from her head in every direction, the wayward lean that had nowhere important to get to. Not 522

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like everyone else on the street. She didn’t want to go back to the deranged church and live with that man whom she’d so quickly grown to hate. She tried to talk herself into courage for leaving and venturing on, truly living in this giant city. But she couldn’t find it within herself. Even more dreadful, she knew, would be the look in the eyes of these well-dressed busy people, if she were to open her mouth and attempt. Ivan was right, after all. He was completely correct, horribly. She would need his assistance if she wanted to stay here. She would have to apologize and ask for his help, again.

It was either that or move on. To where? She had no idea. Some new place whose lights were not so bright, whose scape was not so large and looming. She could never return to Saint Louis, and she wasn’t sure about New Orleans.

New Orleans. She let out a heavy sigh and tears filled her eyes as she lay in the bed staring up at the dim light coming in through the window.

“What’s the matter?” Gabriel asked, shifting beside her.

“Nothing. I’m just missin somebody.”

“Who?” “Idrissa.”

“Who’s that?”

She turned onto her side. Tears ran down her face. “You ever been in love?”

He shook his head no. His eyes sparkled with curiosity. “You were in love with someone? What happened?”

“I was in love twice, I guess. The first one though, I don’t think she really loved me, and the second one,” she ground her teeth and scrunched up her face in anger, “I weren’t good for them. They think like Ivan, I’m not educated, and I’m a big embarrassment.

“The only one who really loved me, I just didn’t feel it. Don’t ever stay with someone loves you more than you love them, Gabriel. That one did the worst.”

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real. Now it’s gone forever. If I still had my Aryan, I wouldn’t be here cryin with you. I’d be somewhere free in a mountain or something, singin my own song, going where I want when I want. Not havin people looking at me like I’m something they have to be dealing with, but like I’m something special, still a sight, but a sight they want to see.”

“Aryan. Who’s Aryan ?”

“It don’t even matter.”

“Oh.” “It’s stupid crying like this.” She wiped her face with her arm.

“Look at me crying, cryin cryin, all about someone who don’t gave two cents’ worth of a rat’s tail anyway. Idrissa only cares about their stupid petitions and the governor’s speechifying and what people’s thinking about them.”

“Them?”

“What?’

“Why do you say them? Is Idrissa a girl? It’s okay. I won’t . . . judge you.”

Mya laughed. The words sounded like something he had heard someone else say and was repeating. She stared mischievously into his eyes. “There’s a lot of different types of things in this world, little boy. Some people are just one thing or the other. But some people are being two things at once. Do you get what I’m saying?”

His mouth opened and closed in wonder. She reached out and tickled him below his belly button. He squealed and smacked her away. “There? You mean, there?”

She nodded and squealed. Gabriel gasped, “Like an angel!”

“Whatchya yapping about?”

“But that can’t really happen.”

“What do you mean, like an angel?”

He leaned in close and spoke breathlessly. “Angels are, well . . . they have both, you know. They’re androgynous. They’re both, male and female. I mean, real angels are. They’re, what’s the word? Hermaphrodites.”

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“I thought you was a real angel.”

“You know what I mean.” He sat up on his elbow. “Really, Mya? Really? Do you think you fell in love with an angel? Maybe they’re a real one.”

She pushed him back down onto the pillow. “You’re getting all worked up and you gotta get to sleep. The service is tomorrow.

God knows he’s gonna wake us up at the crack of it.”

“But really? I mean, really?” He poked her in the arm.

“Yes, really. Really, really! Now hush up.”

the boy fell to sleep easily, as if a switch were struck inside

him. One moment he was there, the next, he was out. Mya stared at the ceiling, her mind swimming through the past and attempting to see what land might make up the horizon, when something caught her ear and pulled her back to her present place. It was not the muffled din of the city beyond the window and courtyard, but sounded as if to be emitting from the very walls of the church that held the city out. She sat up slowly and strained to hear.

It could have been a creaking, an unsettling, if the building had a heart to feel human pain, which was so apparent within the dim echo of the moaning. She looked to Gabriel sleeping soundly, a small spot of spit on his pillow. That’s his ghost, then? she wondered.

She crept slowly out the door and stood listening. The moaning was less muffled in the sanctuary. It stuck her through with a cold chill. It was a shrill voice that rose in a steady crescendo, singing out its agony at its highest note before falling away to catch its breath and rising once more, slowly, to a ghostly crooning. She took a hesitant step forward then another, and another, crossing the dark sanctuary quickly. Although it seemed, at points, to be coming from the walls, there was definitely a direction to be followed where the moaning became less resonant and more precise.

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to herself. “Some old nun didn’t get all her nunning done fore it was too late.”

She turned down the hall and crossed through the kitchen. The wailing grew louder. It rang sharply against her ears. She made her way down the corridor that led to Ivan’s bedroom. It was all around her now, the wailing, filling the hall with its madness. She came up to Ivan’s door and steadied herself, placing her hand firmly on the knob and turned, throwing the door open quickly. Her eyes darted around the room that was lit only by the light coming in from two small windows. It was empty. She stepped inside and went to the bed, tossing back the red and gold silk covers. No one was in it, but the wailing seemed to be completely upon her, as if the thing that was crying had swallowed her up and was knocking her against its ribs with its bawling.

It was difficult to think for the noise. She stood by the bed, holding the sheet, wondering where to turn, when a small glint of an orange light caught her eye, and she noticed that, in the far wall of the bedroom, there was another door. The edges of the door shone with a flickering glow coming from inside.

She slowly approached the door and turned the handle, softly this time. The door gave way as she silently pressed it open.

Where she came from, they called it chicken-wire, because it was used to keep chickens in and coyotes out. He would have called it razor-wire, if he had called it anything at all. But he would never have spoken of it. It’s hard to name what’s eating you.

He sat on the floor, ringed by several burning candles, his back to her, wailing. Blood bloomed like roses on his pale, naked back and streaked down from the teeth of the razor-wire he had wrapped around his body. Both ends of the wire twisted about his wrists, and when he spread his hands, the razors dug more deeply into the rest of him, and he howled.

In the few seconds she had to take in the sight, she noticed great blisters on his shoulders and upper arms, still bubbling, and the smell of singed flesh came at her. Beside him sat a pan with a metal 526

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rod in it. He picked up the rod and held it over a flame, moaning as he did so. The rod began to redden. He twisted himself around, preparing to apply the hot metal to his flesh. She saw his face from the side, contorted with pain, shadowed by the flickering of the candles’ flame, and she realized, she had found the ghost.

He didn’t look human. His pale face twisted from pain to rage as he discovered her. His thin lips pulled back, revealing his white teeth exposed in a horrible growl and he rose to his feet, swiveling to face her.

Standing nude before her, his skeletal body trembled. He held out his hands, invoking another bleeding, threw back his head and howled, the deep, low yowling of a man this time. Mya was frozen. He balled his fists and stomped his foot at her. “Get out!” He screamed. “Get out! Get out!” he repeated in his monstrous cry.

But she couldn’t move. His chest heaved with gasping. He quieted and met her eyes. His face softened and paled from the reddening.

He shook his head then covered his face with his hands, dropping to his knees in a sobbing heap. “Get out. Get out,” he repeated, now in a whimper.

Mya felt her hot breath pushing through her dumb, opened mouth. Her hand began moving before she had time to think of it. Forward it went, placing itself softly on top of his head, his soft hair wetted with sweat. “Ivan,” she whispered.

As soon as her fingers touched down, his head snapped up, and his eyes transformed once again into deep wells of tangled depravity. “I told you to leave me ALONE!” he squealed, his voice hitting the high tones of a violin being tortured, ringing off the walls. He fell forward and continued screaming as Mya leapt backward, and her feet found the frantic pace of her heart, carrying her swiftly away from his otherworldly scene.

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she sat on the edge of the bed. Her nerves were tight harp strings. If you plucked them, they would have played an angelic song. Gabriel wiggled behind her. “What time is it?” he asked, stretching his arms over his head.

“Seven.” She hadn’t slept all night.

“What’re you doing up already? Did Ivan call us?” He sat up beside her and rubbed his eyes. “The service doesn’t begin until eleven. We usually start preparing food and wine at nine. Did he tell you what you’re doing today?” He scooted to the edge of the bed and kicked his feet excitedly. “Are you bartending? He let me do that once, but I spilled it.” Mya stared straight ahead. She wasn’t listening. “Hey, are you listening?” Gabriel waved his hand in front of her face. She smacked it away. He stood and began dressing, diving into his long robe, then strapping on his wings, and finally crowning himself with the silver, tinsel halo. He turned to open the door, but it didn’t give. He jiggled the handle. “Did you lock it?” he asked. Mya was still glaring straight ahead. He flipped the lock undone. “Why did you do that?” He opened the door an inch, then turned, placing his hands on his hips with the manner of an old schoolmarm. “Are you gonna tell me what’s up, or what?”

Mya swallowed hard and eyed him warily. “Just go on.” Her voice came out in a cracked whisper. She coughed down the hoarseness in her throat. “Just go on and start getting ready. I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Oookay.” He rolled his eyes. “Are you having your lady’s time?”

“Just go on.”

“Fine.” He swung open the door and skipped out. She stood and watched him hopping away like a happy frog, crossing under the dome of the painted cathedral. Sunlight spilled down through the large windows, bathing every inch of the sanctuary, as if an ablution, cleansing the walls of the dark anguish that had caked it just hours before.

From the hallway, at the other end of the sanctuary, his tall, thin figure emerged. He stood erect, his cane positioned neatly

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in front of him, dressed in a fine black suit, the pointed coattails of his jacket nearly reaching the floor. Gabriel skipped up to him and stopped. The youth newly awakened, his skin almost a golden sheen in the morning sun showing through the prismed windows, his green-brown eyes sparkling joy below his curled locks, looked more beautiful than the angels painted on the ceiling. Ivan placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder. They spoke to each other.

She couldn’t hear what they were saying. She clutched the side of the door and stood as if peeking around it, although in full view.

Gabriel and Ivan both turned and looked toward her. Ivan patted Gabriel on the head. Gabriel waved at Mya then went along down the hallway, out of sight.

She stepped into the room and quickly closed the door, locking it behind herself. Her insides were jumping beans. She pressed her ear to the wood, keeping her breath shallow, silent. In a few moments, she heard the unmistakable clinking of his cane against the marble floor, growing louder with every step, until it ceased just outside of her room. She stood listening to the sound of his breathing. She hoped he would turn and go away, just leave her alone.

She pressed her ear harder to the door. It rang against her head, shaking from his hard knocking, three times, then he was silent.

She stepped back, keeping her eye on the handle. He knocked again. “I need to have a word with you,” he shouted.

With trembling hands, she unlocked the door, and pulled it open.

The person who stood before her and the man she’d discovered in the night could have been two altogether different people.

The man before her this bright morning gazed down at her with the calm, certain eyes of a statesman. Not even a hint of what she would have recognized as embarrassment or vulnerability shone from them. He was completely in control of himself and his surroundings. Those thin lips could never have produced an undignified utterance. Those steady hands gripping the handle of his cane could never have turned against themselves. It seemed Track Eight: Building a Mystery

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impossible, yet she knew, below the splendid facade of his tailored three-piece suit that spoke to the aesthetics of a century passed, a century of dandies and fools, were the still-fresh scars of his self-destruction. Somewhere shadowing his stern visage, the screwed-up animal disfigured itself in the firelight. She could not look at him without recalling the scent of singed flesh, the contorting face, the naked, bloody body, and his awful howls that had played as a ghost upon these walls for so long.

“Hello, Ivan. Time for church?” She met his eyes, but after two seconds, she couldn’t bear it, and she looked away.

“Let’s not mince words. You and I both know you won’t be attending today’s reading.”

She shook her head and tried meeting his gaze again. “It’s fine.

You don’t have to worry. I won’t say . . . anything.”

“Excuse me?” He chuckled. “I don’t know what you would have to say.” It was like he was wearing a mask. “Say what? To whom?

It just hasn’t worked out is all, my dear. So I expect you will have collected your things and be gone by noon. When I return from church, you won’t be here anymore. Please give me your key now.

I don’t want you forgetting to leave it.”

She took a step back. The air left the room. “What? Yer just kicking me out? Just like that?”

“Oh come on, Mya. I offered to help you. You wouldn’t accept my assistance. There’s no way I can help you make it on your own if you won’t even take part in some basic study. I can’t take care of you forever. No, I can no longer help you. You knew this was not permanent. You are the one who has made it clear you have no intention of bettering yourself. You haven’t gone out even once to seek some means of income. This is the best for you. Out of the nest and all. You’ll be all right.”

“Basic schooling!” she burst out. “Man, you weren’t teaching me nothing but your weird philosophies that got nothing to do with anything in this world. Just the fucked-up world you got going on in yer head! Watcha doin to yerself in there with that hot rod?”

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“Keep your voice down!” He motioned her to be quiet. “Shhh.

Listen. Here. Here’s some money. It’s not much, but you’ll find it goes far.” He handed her eighty dollars. She took it and shoved it in her bra. “I hear there are hostels that cost as little as twenty dollars a night. Try going down to St. Marks corner. There are all sorts of your types there. Many others like you.You’ll fit right in. It’s time you find your own way.”

“Gabriel loves me. Whatchya gonna tell him? You telling him you kicked me out?”

“Yes, well, if you love him, you know, Mya you know that it’s for the best that you’re not in his life.” He held his hand out palm up.

“The key.”

“You can’t do this.”

“Please give me the key and pack your things. If you’re not out by noon, I will call the authorities.”

“I’ll tell them you kidnapped that kid if you do,” she told him threateningly.

He smiled. “Your level of delusion is amazing. You have no power here.” He groped the cane with both hands and positioned it in front of himself. “You think you can stay in my house without my permission? You think the police would listen to you? That they would listen to you over me.” He laughed aloud at the thought.

“Gabriel is going on a trip upstate for a few days with some friends of mine. His bags are already packed. He’ll be leaving directly from the service.” He sighed. “It doesn’t need to end this badly.”

He pushed his hand forward. “It was temporary and now it’s over.

The key.”

Her bottom lip trembled. Her eyes reddened and filled with tears. She reached into her shirt and produced the key. “My God. What do you even put in your bags?” She shoved the key into his hand. He closed his fist around it. “Please don’t come back asking for another handout. That money was the beginning and the end of it. Make no mistake of that.”

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might not have anything in this world at all, but at least I don’t tear down people just cause they seen my hurt.”

For an instant, his face gave way to real emotion. The left side of his bottom lip twitched. He picked his cane up and took it down, swiveling around, and then, in his trioed fashion, he crossed back over the floor of the sanctuary.

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track nine

Cat People (Putting Out Fire)

when you have nothing , the sunlight, carrying with it the

promise of a new day, makes a mockery of light.

It was in this light, casting warmth down upon her like a boldfaced lie, that she found the many faces that made up that awful day. She did not experience them as full flesh-and-blood human beings, but as a series of images, visages coming into view then disappearing as if projected on a screen in front of her, flipping on a reel from one to the next, their eyes never quite settling, their bodies never quite still, their hearts never connecting to the notion of the full human standing before them in need of being seen.

Enter the white, lean, shaved face of the thin man in the suit jacket, his black bag slung around his shoulder, who pointed. He pointed his finger in the air with the sunlight landing on the tip and gleaming like a beckon, “St. Marks is that way, but it’s a hell of a long walk.” (It’s the only thing she knew to ask for.) Flip through the four brown faces of the deli owners, two bearded, who shook their heads in the same fashion, chopping their hands in the air, emitting, “No. No jobs here. No jobs here now.” Flip to the smiling face of the small woman who handed her a slice of pizza and laughed sweetly, also shaking her head no, “We’re not hiring anybody,” laughing again like a hilarious joke had been told. Enter long white faces of young women who tossed change at her when she sat down on the sidewalk, her back against a building, to take a rest in the late afternoon. Enter the dozens of faces passing, 533

dressing her down and sizing up her bags before quickly averting their eyes. Enter the old, graying man who stopped and leaned in, his breath smelling of death and denture fluid, who asked, “How much for one go? I’ll be quick.” Enter two black sisters, pointing in two different directions, arguing over the right way. it was seven pm when she got there. This was it, the final scene,

what seemed mobs of young people coming in waves, mostly Asian or white, each with a drink, or bagel, or cup of frozen yogurt in hand, always looking to the side, to the windows of stores, never forward, as they made their way quickly, shoving. At first she couldn’t understand why in the world Ivan had told her to come here. It was like an outdoor mall for people who looked like they were trying to dress like her, but had failed on account of actually having money to spend on clothes. Is this who he thought she was?

Her arms were tired from carrying her bags for so many hours.

She kept shifting them in awkward positions as she navigated her way through the crowd, swinging them over her shoulders, placing one atop her head and knocking a kid off his skateboard. As she made her way slowly up the street, she began to notice, beneath the scaffoldings and tucked behind stairways and into corners, young people sitting on pieces of cardboard and atop crumpled sleeping bags, most of them displaying handwritten signs begging for money, although they seemed to be paying little attention to what was happening with their propped-up signs or the paper cups beside them.

She went to the end of the block where the small street opened to a wide, bright road. Cars and buses passed each other in an endless stream. She turned and went back down again, slower this time, keeping her eyes on the scattered vagabonds. One of them called out to her. She turned to see a young man waving her over.

She went to him and dropped her bags against the wall.

He was thin and wiry and did not stand to greet her. Lying next to him was an even thinner young woman. They were both white, 534

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but so dirty it was hard to tell. A tattoo covered the right side of the young man’s face in a series of red and blue squares trailing from his forehead to just above his cheek. The girl’s lips, eyebrows, and nose were pierced with pointy silver spikes. Her hair was brown, and had naturally tangled to dreadlocks.

“Hey, I’m Job. This is Muffin Racer.” The girl turned her eyes up to Mya and smiled from where she lay with her head on his lap.

“You wanna sit down?” the girl asked. Mya nodded and took a seat on the flattened cardboard beside them.

“What’s your name?”

“Mya.” “Hey, Mya. Good to know ya.” He shifted his position and the girl sat up, stretching her arms out. “You got any money? We’re trying to get some weed. I got a good hookup if ya want some. I can get dope too.” She shook her head no. “You got any food on you? I’m starving.” She turned and rummaged in her bag, producing two apples and a bread roll. “Cool, man. Can we get one of the apples?” She handed him an apple. He took out a pocketknife and sliced it in two, handing Muffin Racer one half. They took to the apple like a couple of health nuts. “Thanks, dude,” he told her.

Mya decided to have one too. She chewed the apply loudly.

“That’s Pancake over there,” Job told her, pointing to a shirtless, muscled kid a few yards away. He sat on the sidewalk atop an old blanket. A large dog held by a bulking chain sat beside him. The dog was wearing a pair of sunglasses, and he and the dog were sharing a beef sandwich. “Hey Pancake!” Job hollered. Pancake looked up and they waved to each other.

Mya waved to him, he waved back and he hollered, “Heya!” through his mouthful.

“That over there’s Jennifer Riot,” Job said, pointing to another boy sitting down past pancake. “He’s a tattoo artist. You want a tattoo, he’s your guy. He barters for it.”

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you around before.”

Mya shrugged her shoulders, turning her apple to an unchewed side. “I guess.”

“Where you from?”

“Around.”

“Oh yeah?” Muffin Racer laughed. “Us too. But we’ve been in the city for a while. You know the city good?”

“Nah, not yet.”

As she sat chewing on her apple, listening to these two chatter and point, her view of the street began to shift and a new world opened up before her. The people passing on the sidewalks, carrying cups of yogurt and coffees, their arms full of shopping bags, their eyes darting from window to window, seemed to fade into the background, becoming a natural stream that needed to be navigated occasionally, but not recognized as any cognizant being.

Opening before her was an entire neighborhood of street urchins who spent their days and nights on the makeshift beds, wandering back and forth, trading food and clothing, money and drugs and affections, as if this was the new suburb, the new Mecca, and not only their only option, but also acknowledging, at least for now and for most, there was no alternative.

This is what Ivan had meant. And in many ways, she knew, he was right. She was one of these. She fit in easily and looked as though she’d been plucked from the same vine. She felt the same fear and alienation to street life as they must have each felt at one time. But also, there was a safety, an unspoken trust that these people would protect her, if not from each other, at least from the outside world.

Pancake had an extra sleeping bag and he gave it to her without a second thought. Jennifer Riot offered to do her first tattoo for free. Muffin Racer and Job took her into their corner like a house guest, for three nights, without so much as an invitation or a question.

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their clothes out to dry on the construction scaffolding in the morning. She was introduced to the McDonald’s restroom where they showered in the sink during the “off-peak” hours. It was a life. on the afternoon of her fourth day with the group, Job came into some cash. He left for three hours and returned with five large pizzas, a bottle of whiskey, and a bag of white powder. Mya shared the whiskey and the pizza. Pancake and Jennifer, as well as a few she’d never met before, came across the street for a long visit to drink and snort and chow down. By evening, their not-so-tuckedaway corner had turned into a tornado of howling revelry. Two of the new people had their guitars out and were jamming. A small crowd had gathered round them in a semicircle. Job and Pancake took to the sidewalk, dancing and spinning each other in circles, throwing their fists above their heads, and bouncing up and down like jacks.

Job and Pancake locked legs and spun. Pancake kicked out and Job was sent reeling into a very large, young, well-dressed jarhead who had joined the audience. He slammed into his side, and as soon as he made contact, the kid grabbed Job by the shoulders and tossed him hard to the ground. “What the fuck?” the kid boomed, just as Muffin Racer jumped on his back and started pounding him in the side of the head with his fist. “Fuckin fratter,” she howled as she pounded. “Get yer NYU ass back to yer dorm, asshole!”

What happened then, Mya saw in flashes of red. All the people divided into runners and fighters. She stood in place and shoved who came too close. The crowd turned into a small but seething mass of fists smacking against faces and hands pulling back against arms. Then there were the sirens and the spinning lights. Then there was running. Then she was being lifted and pressed against pavement, her hands twisted back and tied in plastic binders. She was stood up and led by two men with a hand grasping each arm, and placed, she was placed as one places a dish into a cabinet, onto a white shelf, and the white metal doors closed behind her and

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she slid down on the small bench, and others were placed beside her, but all she saw was the white door closing to darkness. The back of the locked door, and the tight plastic around her wrists signaled caged, and there she was once more. The paddy wagon police van so much like the caged wagon of the beast that swallowed her mother, the beast that inhabited her. there is a certain poison that is secreted by the heart when

it is broken. There is a certain poison that is secreted by the heart when it is broken irreparably. There is a certain poison that is secreted by the heart and injected into the mind. The poison that is injected into the mind smells of lycanthropy. It may lie dormant for a lifetime, or it may never cease to plague. Or, like the old followers of the caped apothecary, one may find her brilliant moon in various shifting forms, suddenly calling out her curse and sending her into a spell of seizure and gut-wrenching metamorphosis beyond her control. To the devastation of onlookers, or, if she is lucky, before the blind eyes of night, she finds herself overtaken.

And she is an animal. as if awaking from an unsettling dream of being human, the

beast opened her eyes. The metal bars shone gray in the fluorescent light. The sound of rain against building chimed dully.

There were no windows against which to check evidence of the sound. She paced and inspected the lock. Finding herself stripped of tools and familiar clothing, she growled and hunched in the corner, purring fiercely before falling into a watchful silence. Her breath was low at first; her thoughts began to spread out like a living nightmare before her: “Just like her momma, don’t like to see nothing caged up.” Her mother’s voice was in her head. But she was not her mother’s daughter. She was, as she always knew she had been, the caged beast tearing open the flesh of the woman she loved so dearly. She was the tiger behind the bars. Beyond all guilt, she was the tiger clawing and taking its revenge. The red meat of the 538

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thing that was everything to her hung tenuously from her growling lips. The white room that trapped her filled with blood. It set her pulse to racing. She hunched and her breathing grew deathly heavy. She heard her mother screaming. She saw her eyes shining at the girl that had been her as she as a tiger ripped open her mother’s belly with her giant paw and took her mother’s neck in her fangs, snapping.

She shook her head and gnashed her teeth, her eyes reddening and welling with madness’s tears. The others in the cell looked on with wary eyes at that no-longer-human girl curling in the corner, and kept their distance, save one woman, who after an hour of watching this monstrosity writhing, proclaimed she’d had enough.

She approached with confidence, but retreated quickly after the girl hissed, clawed, and took a giant leap from all fours, just missing catching the woman in the side of the face. The woman howled.

Two guards came in, wrestling her to the floor and cuffing her.

They transported her to another, smaller room, locking her in, completely alone.

She passed the time, night after night, uncertain of the lapses of days or of the length of her stay, sleeping often then awaking in segments. Food was shoved in through a small window and taken back out with regularity, but was mostly left untouched. The claws that had only shown themselves in her most brutal moments grew into permanent hooks from her fingers. The fangs that before had come like a horrible dream sharpened themselves and set firmly in her gums. She transformed, the fur growing thicker every day, until that fur skin was as natural as her own human flesh, whose memory was becoming more and more distant. When she was content, instead of smiling, she purred. When she was unhappy, she growled. Mostly she slept, always waking to an increasingly clear realization that she had never been the human dreaming herself to be a tiger, but had always truly been the tiger, only dreaming herself to be human.

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finally , after she didn ’ t know how many days, the door was

opened and a man came in. She turned her head up. He led her out of the cage and into a room with a woman in a white jacket who had her strip naked and lightly inspected her body. She was then sent to another room where she was given back her own clothes.

Then to another room, where a man behind a desk repeated the words, “Recognizance. No Charge. Do you understand? Anyone you can call to pick you up?” She shook her head.

She was let out in the late afternoon. Functioning on a combination of instinct and directions from strangers, she found her way back to the spot she’d been taken from. She wasn’t that far away.

As she entered the street, a vaguely familiar face rushed up to her.

It was a friend of Jennifer Riot’s. He told her they had her stuff.

He asked if the pigs had fucked her up. She kept very silent, only nodding in response. He did not see the cat eyes she was watching him with. He did not smell the fur that was still cloaking her frame.

He brought her the bags and blanket and offered her a half-eaten sandwich. She finished it quickly then went to the corner, where she’d stayed with Job and Muffin Racer, which was now empty, curled in the blanket and slept. Her dreams were like fur. Her dreams were like muscle and fangs, prickled and rippling, craving blood.

Just as strange was the vision when she opened her eyes to the early morning bustle, and the poking in her side to which she hissed and clawed. This did not dissuade the poking, and the offender began to come into focus, hovering above her, the silver halo seeming also to shine above the expectant eyes and white feathered wings trembling with excitement. “I’ve been here looking for you for days. Where have you been? I thought you left the city? Oh my God. Are you okay? What happened with you two, huh? Hey, are you okay?” He shoved his head in closer. She blinked and turned onto her back. “You don’t have to sleep out here anymore.” He leaned in and hugged her tight. “Please come back. Come back with me.” He released her and she sat up, still weary from sleep.

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He shoved his face in front of hers. “I went on a hunger strike, like Gandhi! And it worked. He says you can stay for two months and he’ll help you find somewhere. You don’t even have to do school, or the fire services. Actually, I don’t think you’re allowed to be in the services, but you can stay, anyway.”

Her head was pounding. She wondered if he would ever stop yammering. She shook her hair out and licked the back of her hand then swiped it a couple of times behind her ears, cleaning herself. “Don’t worry. I’ve got it all figured out. You can go with me to Central Park on the weekends and you can juggle and do your tricks for tourists. You can make a lot of money that way. We can do it together. Everything is going to be fine. I didn’t know he was kicking you out. I wouldn’t have left. I swear. You believe me don’t you?” He stood and started tugging on her arm. “Come on. Let’s go. He’s waiting. You’ll come, won’t you? Please come on.”

And without answering, she stood, took up her two large bags, and followed him as he bounced excitedly, proclaiming his joy at her decision. She made her way silently, toward Ivan’s begrudging charity, with her eyes down to the ground in religious humility, as if his charity were the new Mecca, as if there were no acceptable alternative. A growl rumbled lowly in her throat. She licked her fangs and blinked her patient cat eyes.

The street urchins she left behind would repeat the story for weeks of the girl who was let out of jail only to be taken away the next day by an angel, “I swear, like, a little gay angel, with the wings and everything.”

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track ten

Burn

mya and gabriel had passed nearly a month together in the

church. She avoided Ivan as much as possible, and he granted her the same courtesy. Gabriel had the bright idea of taking her to Central Park on the weekends. He collected cash while she juggled for the tourists. They were quite a pair. His angel costume only complimented their act. He thought she was going to save up the money they made for a place to stay, but after a few weeks, she began making strange purchases on the internet.

Each time she snuck into Ivan’s office to use the computer, he had followed behind her keeping quiet, just as she instructed.

He quietly showed her how to turn on the computer and access the internet, amazed at her ignorance. He quietly typed in the words “Purchase Fertilizer Cheap,” and “Electronic Detonator,” and “Albino Horse Sold at Auction.” All but one of the searches were fruitful and multiplied. When the goods were delivered to the church, he’d quietly kept watch in the hallway, making sure no one saw her accept the delivery in Ivan’s name. He’d even quietly shown her an old cellar room in the back of the extensive basement, dark and cold, where no one ever looked, where she could keep her precious cargo and easily spend her afternoons working, with no threat of interruption. He didn’t know what it was that she was working on, and every time he asked, she just told him to be quiet.

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her second week back in the church, loneliness had grabbed

her up. She decided to write her favorite uncle a letter. She folded it in an envelope, scrawled his address across the front. Lacking a stamp, she’d asked to borrow one from Ivan. Instead he took the letter, offering to send it out with his own mail. Noticing she’d forgotten to include a return address, which he assumed to be the simple mistake of a young woman unaccustomed to letters, he added it to the top corner.

Days later, this letter resulted in a phone call from that man whose voice was as grimy as he was grizzled to the man whose life he’d recently saved. “Looks like we found her, Africa. But I think we maybe got ourselves a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Well see, she wrote me this letter here.”

“Oh, so what’s the problem?” Idrissa asked. “Do you have an address?”

“Yeah, we got the address. It’s some church. I can’t get seem to get a number listed, but we got the address anyhow.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well I’m worried, see. The letter, well, it was just one sentence.

I mean, more like one word. The whole letter was just one word.”

“What was the word?”

“Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrr.”

“Oh. I see.” only a few months had passed since that first weird day in

New York, yet her perception had leapt fathoms. The rain, as it beat against her brow, soaking her hair, although it was the same rain picked from the same waters blown by the same winds of the same city, felt like an entirely different entity than it had that first night. That first night, she and the city’s elements had been strangers. The first impression is usually nothing like the real thing. Because she’d first experienced the city with an unfamiliar Track Ten: Burn

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sensation, because it had approached her the same way—without fully showing, without fully giving—their interpretations of each other had been the wrong ones. This city thought she was just another wayward country girl needing to be tested. She thought this city was any other American city, only bigger, only shinier, full of the same good-intentioned but tragically asleep people, only more of them. Expectations can make for horribly mistaken first impressions. Now the city trembled around her stepping, finding a beast fit for the wildest jungles pacing inside its borders. Now she knew the city, too, knew something as common as the rain now.

Knew it well. It felt nothing like the first time and seemed even to approach her differently. It got inside her ears and rattled her teeth. It soaked her clothes and made her wipe it out of her eyes.

She tugged on the rope, her wet fingers slipping ever so slightly.

Thunder cracked in the distance. A torrent spilled with it. She’d gotten to know this city and its rain. She’d gotten to know this city.

But she didn’t think this city fully knew her. Not yet. She was going to make it have to wipe her out of its eyes. gabriel held one of

the buckets above his head, squinting against the downpour. “I told ya, be real careful with that!” She hollered from the scaffolding above him. “Keep it steady. I’m gonna hoist it up. Just twelve more like this, then you get to come up here and see the view for yerself. Ya got it?” He nodded. The first bucket left his fingertips, rocking slightly to and fro as it traveled upward. Lightning lit the sky, glowing like a techno heartbeat.

The bucket disappeared over the edge of the blue construction scaffolding above him. Almost as soon as it was gone, an empty rope snaked its way back down. She poked her head over the edge.

“Anyone coming?”

He shielded his eyes from the torrent and looked left then right.

“There’s nobody. It’s three in the morning.”

“I thought this was the city that never sleeps,” she mumbled, disappearing again behind the wooden panel as she snaked the

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rope down. Gabriel got ahold of it and tied it around the second bucket. He heard her yelling at him to tie it tight. He fidgeted with his halo. It was getting all wet. Just ten to go after this, he told himself. He tied the knot around the handle and pulled on it with his teeth, making sure it was tight, then hoisted the bucket above his head and whistled. The slack tightened, and the second bucket lifted, as if miraculously floating off his fingertips, like a resurrection. He kept his eyes upward, watching the bucket ascend and disappear, then his view extended higher.

It was shining and it looked like it was going to fall on him.

When he stood directly beneath very tall buildings, they always gave him that feeling. Even though his feet were firmly on the ground, he always felt like he was falling off the top, or like the top was about to tip over and smash him flat as a smashed insect. He couldn’t see the top tonight, although through the fog and rain, he could still see that it was lit up, and he could see what color. “It’s red tonight.”

“What’d you say?”

“Look up. See. It was purple yesterday,” he shouted. “It’s red today. They change it every day. All the days have a different significance, for holidays and things.”

“I can’t hear you,” she hollered. “Can’t ya keep quiet for a second? Tell me about it after yer done, when you get up here. Just keep tying! Can ya do that?” She tossed the rope over instead of snaking it down. It landed on the wet sidewalk with a plop. He scrambled for it and went to tying it around the handle of the third bucket, keeping quiet now. She was always telling him to be quiet. the fog created a yellow dome reflecting the lights that burned

up the wet darkness of the night sky like a massive oil lamp burning in the minds of the restless. Rain continued to spill with no sign of stopping as lightning cut the clouds. The sound of the rain was of a shivering tarp, a drum of rice, a thousand bamboo falling.

“Can we stop for a sec?”

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“Would you quit yer bellyaching? There’s only eight more to go.

You want me to come down there and do it myself ?”

“Can’t we just take a break?” He wondered what her plans for tomorrow might be, as well her plans for the future beyond the next day. But he was filled with worry that perhaps those plans and any thoughts of any future did not extend beyond this night, this great and absurd act of destruction.

“Hell, no we aint takin a break!”

“Pleeeease.”

“Oh for fuck sake. Fine. Get yer ass on up here.”

He scrambled up the scaffolding and perched beside her. She craned her neck back, getting that vertigo view of the straight line up extending into infinity. Gabriel followed her cue. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She grunted in agreement.

“You sure we have to blow it up?”

She snapped her head back, looking him straight in the eye. A deathly groan emitted through her lips. He flinched. “You’re not getting queasy on me, are ya?” she accused him.

He shook his head no. She grabbed his chin, turning him to face. The rain ran down their noses. “I just don’t want to hurt anybody,” he told her. Her eyes danced at his. Her eyes looked different than they did when he first met her. For the last month or so, he’d increasingly wondered if she was in there anymore. She growled again then shook her head, as if shaking away a greater inclination. She took her hand and began cleaning her hair like a cat, as if her hand was a paw. Gabriel hunched down and cradled his knees to his chest.

“You’re always acting like a . . .” his voice croaked.

“Like a what?” she shouted.

“Like a . . . a . . . a cat, Mya. You’re always acting like a cat.”

She squinted her eyes and hissed loudly. He hid his head in his knees. She sat back and stared at him, sorry for her aggression.

“Hey, come on. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hiss at ya.”

He lifted his head. His eyes were red and tears were streaming 546

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down his cheeks imperceptibly in the rain. “I don’t want to do this,” he hiccupped. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

She scooted over next to him and placed her arm around him.

“Are you an angel, or not?”

He swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes. I am.”

“And what are angels? Huh?” “We’re the messengers of God.” “That’s right. And God’s message aint always nice and easy, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“Remember Gomorrah?” He nodded. “Remember Job?” He nodded again. “That’s right. Don’t look back unless you want to be turned to salt. Everyone remembers that. And someday they gonna be remembering this, too.”

“I just don’t want to hurt anybody.” the last of the buckets had been tied and hoisted atop the

scaffolding. She took the timing device out of her bag and went to work, attaching first the tubes that ran from bucket to bucket, connecting to two small vials, then the wires from the timer to lever device. The buckets, connected by tubes, were placed several yards apart, running the full extent around three of the four walls that made up the second floor of the Empire State Building where they sat atop the construction scaffolding.

The rain was still coming as hard as before and showed no sign of stopping. She and Gabriel were soaked through. Gabriel still sat, his knees tucked tight against his chest, rocking and shivering as she went about her work. “Are you sure we can do this and nobody’s going to get hurt? I don’t know, Mya. It’s a pretty big building. If it falls . . .”

She snapped her head up, “What’d I tell ya. I done this before, lots of times. No one ever got hurt. Didn’t I tell ya that?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“But what? God, you keep going on and on.”

He shrugged. “Sorry.” He craned his head back, taking in the Track Ten: Burn

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dizzy sight of the bright lights below the needle flickering in the rain. “But are you sure you have to? Even if you don’t hurt anbody, it’s so pretty.”

“Ah Jeeesus! It’s not pretty. It’s a flipping lie!” she shouted, standing and whipping one of the wires, angrily, so that it popped. She had that look in her eyes. Since the day he’d found her sleeping on the sidewalk and brought her back to the church, he thought to himself, she had had at least a hint of that look in her eyes. He couldn’t have described it in words, but there was something otherworldly to it, inhuman. It was an empty, cold look like a white void spinning and it sent chills all through him when it took her over completely, as it did during her moments of anger. She pointed up to the light. “No can go up there if they aint got the proper forms. They say I aint good enough for them. I’ll show them who aint good enough. I can’t be on top of the world. No one can. It shouldn’t be a special privilege to stand up and see the world. It’s blindness. That’s what it is.” She hollered. “Pretty? You think that’s pretty?” she shouted again.

“No. I guess not. Nevermind.” He buried his head in his knees, his rain-soaked halo drooping.

She sat back down and went to replacing the wire. “Wouldn’t even let me in to look. They’ll see. Aint nobody should be able to see that far, anyway. You think it’s so damned pretty? Yeah. You said ‘it’s too pretty to blow up,’” she mocked him. “I’ll show you what’s pretty. Fire’s what’s pretty. Rearranging’s what’s pretty. Best city in the world, my ass. He thinks I got no power. He don’t know what power is. He don’t know the meaning of the word. Thinks he’s better than everybody. Just like this tower, just cause it’s the tallest thing, don’t mean it can’t get taken down.”

Gabriel lifted his eyes to look at her, but after a second, decided he preferred the view of his knees. His stomach tightened and ached. She needed something else, someone else. He couldn’t get through to her. She needed someone older, someone who wasn’t afraid to tell her no. She needed someone she trusted, who could 548

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look into her and see what was going on behind her eyes. She needed someone who could call her out by name, and bring her back from wherever she’d gone.

After another rain-soaked hour, she stood, smacked her hands together and proclaimed, “It’s all done did!” She nodded proudly toward the small timing device with a miniature keyboard on the front. “Twenty-four hours. That’s what we got. See there.” Gabriel stood beside her, looking down at it. “See there now. Don’t worry.

It’s all planned out. No one’s gonna get hurt.” Another growl rumbled in her chest, or maybe it was a purring. He couldn’t tell.

“Yep. All done. Tomorrow around midnight, we call it in. That’ll give em a chance to get the area cleared. But there won’t be many folks here so late. Got it? That’s why I set it for the night, see. I’ve done this before, like I said. No one’s getting hurt.” She patted his shoulder. “No more bellyaching from you. Okay?”

He shook his head, “But won’t they just undo it when you call it in and they find it?”

“Ha! I’d like to see em try! Remember that puzzle I showed ya? The one that was nine steps you couldn’t figure out? Well, this here’s like twenty steps, and if you get it wrong, it blows, and I’m the only one knows the right order. Don’t you worry about that.”

“Oh.” as they made their way back, stepping slowly wearily through

the rain, if she had been a great listener, she might have noticed, far in the distance, crossing the New York border, the sound of hoofbeats keeping time with her stepping. The sound of her inheritance finding its way back home. as the sun rose over New York City that morning, there were sightings, but no confirmed reports. Some thought it must have strayed from one of the city’s many famous parades, although no one could recall what parade it would have been that day. A few people flashed photos that came to nothing or very little. Still, it

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could not be completely ignored, even by the city’s call center, that there had been several reports, although none confirmed, of a man riding a white horse through the city streets. He was described as tall, thin, black, short haired. The descriptions of the man, though, were completely overshadowed by the repeated description of the horse. “It was white. Pure white. White mane, white tail, white hooves. Everything. But that’s not the crazy part. Its eyes, I swear, its eyes were red. Like red as strawberries.”

“Red as pomegranates.”

“Red as roses.”

“As an apple.”

“Piercing red.”

“As though they had been painted on.”

“It had the Devil’s eyes.”

“Like a harvest moon.”

“Like two wounds there in the side of its head.”

“Those eyes were red as blood. It was like a dream. It was a white horse, and instead of eyes, it just had two burning blisters.

Wells of blood.”

“No. Really.”

“Like the horse was just made of blood under that white fur.

Like somewhere, there was enough blood to make a whole horse.”

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A b ou t t h e A u t h or

chavisa woods is a Brooklyn-based writer and artist, and recipi-

ent of the 2009 Jerome Foundation Award for emerging writers.

Her debut collection of short stories, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Debut Fiction.

Woods has read or performed at The Whitney Museum, Penn State, the New York Vision Festival, the NYC HOWL festival, and the New York Hot Festival.

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Abou t t h e s e v e n s t or i e s press

seven stories press is an independent book publisher based

in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www. sevenstories.com.

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