Black Tickets (7 page)

Inside is the clammy clank and slap of anywhere’s jails. In a few weeks I’m on my way to the pen, big-time gleam where I learn a new career and swim awhile in the underbelly of that metal whale. The whale eats what it’s thrown and hums like a city. During my wait the heat drops by every day, smooth heat from the DA’s office in expensive suits. No more street games; it’s big bucks, crooked rumba of the dodg’em politicians. They tell me the whole story again: Neinmann in the burned-down Obelisk, a four-alarm fire in the
A.M
., and the old man crouched like a pile of spindled ash in the office by stacks of used reels. How like Raymond to fry Neinmann in his own thick oil, and do it so they can’t prove arson. Or maybe Raymond didn’t set it at all. And maybe it wasn’t an intended deliverance I got handed the day the heat picked me up at that phone booth waiting for his call; maybe it wasn’t them who were supposed to find me. Who was I waiting for? Jamaica, I like to think you had at least devised something quick for me; just a flash, an imprint before the black came up. Sometimes, lately, I like to think you devised nothing at all; that the sacred goons I imagine came down on you cleanly; that you’re neck-deep in darkness yourself; then I turn off the light in my head and, like a fool, hope you’ll be around to settle up with. Tomorrow I’ll sing and sell you all; but, one way or another, you’re all gone aren’t you? and your names were only stories.

One, ten, twelve. Talk to me; go first. Games for two, trade sides and roll. Hold me; your back a broad olive blade that sharpens, slick with moisture, if we keep going. I could drink you up; lay down. I hold you like a baby, tell you I really love you, say words you like and then start dreaming on the downs, fading, passing through, big truck labeled with a bright red blur. You run the tub full of water before I’m too gone and walk me there in the fluid drunk of the pills. In the water you hold me under my arms, move the wet cloth on my skin and finally pull me over you, soapy and sleep-heavy. Water closes to our necks as you slide down under me; I keep my face on your skin to breathe and see your black body in silhouettes, a string of paper cutout dolls with joined hands who join hands around me, rumbling a thin white noise; and as they open their mouths I see their phosphorescent teeth glow a pale arpeggio. In the water obsidian beetles surface, doing their six-legged swims. I touch their hard shells and they crack, spill a silver mercury the thickness of fish eggs. It clouds the water slowly, furling and smoky; in the smoke I see your hands moving water to reach me. When you touch my flesh I slide out of it and wake up standing, propped by your arms, your knee, the cold tile wall. I feel the cloud still seeping from you and it dries on my hand, cracking to a pile of charcoal numbers; dim serial of odd and even, a catalog of fools.

At first, all the girls wore dresses. There was a checkered flag of separation and the race was nothing on a board laid out with paper money and plastic hotels for Park Place. There were metal hoops to make points in and the balls sectioned
off like melons in orange and black. The rules were written down and smeared in a fruity juice on all our faces.

The morning before I never saw you again, I opened my eyes and your shorn hair was all over my naked front. You had cut it to a jagged bowl around dawn, standing over me with scissors and scattering the pieces.

S
HE REMEMBERED
swerving, cocaine lane, snowy baby in her veins. Like a white sock over her nose, smelling clean cotton in dark halls of the seedy Plaza in Bogotá. Roaches glittered their hard backs and the heavy Spanish flies buzz-droned, fucking in midair. She met Hernando on the street in Cali, a few blocks from the English school her parents had chosen to rehabilitate her. He was high, strutting around with a red flowerpot on his head and a green umbrella stuck in his hip pocket. ’Tis Our Lady of the Stamens, he said to her in English. The rich Americana. Daddy a government stoolie with a crazy daughter, screaming since puberty about those voices under beds whose instructions aren’t clear. Paranoia, she told the psychiatrist, sounds like an exotic liqueur. You drink it down hot and it makes you shake. Hernando bowed and the clay pot smashed on stone.

She stole money for him. For his mouth biting her fingers
as he slapped her hips and ground against her. Careening down midnight streets in her mother’s long silk scarf, his body was a luminous black. They shot up in moss-walled bathrooms, blunt needle sinking like a nail’s foot while jet-haired Catholic whores called from doorways.
Sí, el polvo de los angeles, yo soy tuya. Tuya. Tuya
. She took photographs of his sinewy marked arms and sent them to her friends in the States. They ran coke and smack across the border in a flatbed truck with two borrowed babies and some goats tied in back. Their stench in the flat heat, Hernando dozing, his hands fisted. She felt them being devoured in the carnivorous satin flower of Colombia. They pulled off the road and squatted behind a chicken coop to fix. She saw he had done too much, his eyes glazed. The coke came up in her throat. She grabbed the needle from him and stuck it in a squawking rooster. Hernando hit her in the mouth, the maggoty chickens beating them with wings. A farmer came running out of the dirty house with a machete yelling
Monstruos, Monstruos
. She dragged Hernando to the truck, the farmer’s bare feet chanting in the dust behind them. The dark babies looked up at her.

Rain in Washington for three weeks, first her uncle’s house and now the sanitarium. She could see. Arlington Cemetery under gray pellets, rows of dumb stones. Embroidery. She pulled the thread in and out, working the plumed tail feathers. They asked her why she damned herself, they asked her why she didn’t. All day Sunday the ministers came with their pamphlets. She liked to watch the priests in their feather-stitched robes. Blessing their vials of water, they touched fingers to the foreheads of the monstrous.
Domine domine
, they crooned, as each angel closed her eyes.

W
HEN
I
WAS
fifteen back in Charleston, my cousin Phoebe taught me to strip. She was older than my mother but she had some body. When I watched her she’d laugh, say That’s all right Honey sex is sex. It don’t matter if you do it with monkeys. Yeah she said, You’re white an dewy an tickin like a time bomb an now’s the time to learn. With that long blond hair you can’t lose. An don’t you paint your face till you have to, every daddy wants his daughter. That’s what she said. The older dancers wear makeup an love the floor, touchin themselves. The men get scared an cluster round, smokin like paper on a slow fire. Once in Laramie I was in one of those spotted motels after a show an a man’s shadow fell across the window. I could smell him past the shade, hopeless an cracklin like a whip. He scared me, like I had a brother who wasn’t right found a bullwhip in the shed. He used to take it out some days and come back with such a
look on his face. I don’t wanna know what they know. I went into the bathroom an stood in the fluorescent light. Those toilets have a white strip across em that you have to rip off. I left it on an sat down. I brushed my hair an counted. Counted till he walked away kickin gravel in the parkin lot. Now I’m feelin his shadow fall across stages in Denver an Cheyenne. I close my eyes an dance faster, like I used to dance blind an happy in Pop’s closet. His suits hangin faceless on the racks with their big woolly arms empty. I play five clubs a week, $150 first place. I dance three sets each against five other girls. We pick jukebox songs while the owner does his gig on the mike. Now Marlene’s gonna slip ya into a little darkness Let’s get her up there with a big hand. The big hands clap an I walk the bar all shaven an smooth, rhinestoned velvet on my crotch. Don’t ever show em a curly hair Phoebe told me, Angels don’t have no curly hair. That’s what she said. Beggin, they’re starin up my white legs. That jukebox is cookin an they feel their fingers in me. Honey you know it ain’t fair what you do Oh tell me why love is a lie jus like a ball an chain. Yeah I’m a white leather dream in a cowboy hat, a ranger with fringed breasts. Baby stick em up Baby don’t touch Baby I’m a star an you are dyin. Better find a soft blond god to take you down. I got you Baby I got you Let go.

DUDE

S
EE
I
’D MET
this old dirt farmer in a bar the night before. Said he was selling his truck cheap and I could come down to La Rosa and pick it up. Said three hundred dollars and it didn’t run too bad but I’d better buy it now. So I hitched down Sunday morning, mud churches on all three dirt streets ringing their black bells. I found him wringing a chicken’s neck in the yard, did it quick and finished before he looked at me. Dark seamed face under a broad hat and the chicken head a little dangling thing hanging out his fist. I told him, said I’d come about the truck, did he still want—thinking we were both pretty drunk and he might have dreamed he had a truck, since it didn’t look like he had anything but a shanty house that leaned right into dirt. He spat and turned for me to follow him, holding the chicken now by a splayed leg that was bright orange in the rising heat. The nails on his hands were colored that same dull shine as hen’s claws.

Us walking in the dust yard past old tires and a rotten bedspring, mule tied to a pump by the chicken shed, and he stands finally by this thing that’s a red fifties Chevy with a built-on bed shelved with chicken cages. Crosses and a blackened corn husk doll hanging from the mirror, keys strung on a hair ribbon. I got in and drove around the yard fast, chickens squawking and the old cur dogs snapping at the wheels. The old man squatted where he was, plucked the hen. Feathers flew and dropped as I pulled up. I said the truck ran good and if he had the title I’d pay him now and take it.

He motioned me inside a house somehow dark even in all that light. Smell of wool shawls and vinegar. I stumble blind into a table and voices, Spanish curses, stop and start. I look up and Rita, she’s standing there not three feet away, having ripped the curtains off one window; she’s screaming in her voice that goes throaty and harsh, and the light pours in all over her. Hot yellow gravy of light, her black eyes, and the red skirt tight, blouse loose old lace ripped at the shoulder. I wanted to roll my hand in her; I could feel her wet against my legs. The old woman stands by the stove, side of her face shining, and when she turns I see she’s not crying but one eye weeps. Rita walks past me steaming from her hands, the cheap plastic curtains clutched and dragging.

I watch the old man rummage in a drawer but feel her at the end of the long room. Rita moving, bending over a small chair. Old man counts the money and I turn to watch her. The light rolling now, leaked into the dark, ripples the skin of the dark and flies fly up in loose knots; low slow buzz in corners yellowed and pulled out by the light that rolls across the surfaces of things in yellow blocks. Dust in the light, and her body moving down the long room pulls a white path
like an animal leaving water. She bends from the waist; under the cloth her thighs are muscles, long curves. In the chair sits a baby whose head is too big. His legs don’t reach the floor; his skin is stretched tight and pale like the light is under it. His hair is white and fine, swirled on his man-sized head, and I know he is a child only by the way he cradles a shoe to his face. Rocks the shoe slow in short arms. Rita has her hands in his hair, her shoulders tensed and curved to him. A sound catches in her throat and comes out low, folding into the yellow room. Thick juice of light circling, curling us in. Child wheezing and rocking, rocking the shoe slow, his mouth on it. It is her shoe and Rita croons, rocking with him, pulling the shoe away.

RITA

I bought my mother those glasses so she wouldn’t have to live in the dark, spent a hundred dollars on an El Paso doctor so she could see in the light without the eye burning. And she wouldn’t wear them. Would hide them and move like a bat in the dark, the windows covered. The child in his chair with his sounds, she singing her songs low in the dark, he weaving in his chair. Me youngest of six, and at near fifty she gave birth to him, his white skin and his head hanging like a heavy bloom on the neck that couldn’t move it. His eyes rolling back to see in that head that must have been a field of snow inside. No father, she said, he is what was in me. And the eye in her too, still pouring from her slow. Bringing grain from the store on the mule, she crossed against the light and a truck knocked her down, the mule kicking her face. And so the eye weeps and hurts in the daylight.
Pounding meal on the wood table she sings in the dark like she sang then, my five brothers building cars in the yard, and me they called
brujita
, little witch.

At dusk the townspeople came to be healed. Paid her in corn and cloth. Then the corn stacked by the door and tomatoes hung to dry and sides of bacon, their white fat thick as my waist. She in her white shawls and her almost black skin put her hands in powders ground from roots. The villagers knelt, her sound wheeling over them. Their eyes fluttered and their hands unclenched, jerking as sounds came.
Muerte dios muerte muerte
. They got up and bowed to the witch their children won’t touch. Castanets’ slow dull clack followed them, their feet going away in the dark yard. From the time I was a baby she gave me a sharp stick and told me to draw them in the dirt to keep their spirits from returning. She made her witching dolls from husks; when I was older she gave me paints to draw their faces. I made them: farmers’ heads and goitered women already old.