Black Tickets (8 page)

My father was gone long weeks to Las Vegas, Reno. Sometimes when he came back we moved to hotels in El Paso and bought clothes in stores. Remember, she’d say, cracked voice clacking on her teeth, you ain’t no Spanish brats—You got Gypsy blood and your daddy’s Apache cheeks. I remember her long fingers on my face. He didn’t come back. The house was her power and she wouldn’t leave. The town still creeps to her at dusk, women with shawls low over faces. The priest says it’s sacrilege, they heaping ashes by the door.

Already I was with men and she was big, her belly strained, and the labor went two days. Women from the town wouldn’t help. She cut herself to let the child’s head pass and the women, hearing she had a devil, burned candles by their beds. Later the old man came with his shriveled
dolls, his silence, and no name I ever heard her say. He built a chair on rollers when the child could sit and kept lanterns lit all night to make the sounds soft.

Now the child’s sounds are muffled and low except when I dance. He knows me, holds out his hands for my shoes. My mother takes dried cactus from a wood box and grinds it, sprinkles a powder on his hair. I make the signs and the castanets warm in my fingers; we put the child’s chair in the center of the room and my feet on brushed boards start slow thud. The drum, her low voice quavering, my arms high, the clack silver clack and the child’s eyes focus, hold me fast, faster, me spinning around him. He holds up his head, and under his skin I see the pale blue veins. Faster, my feet pound floor, her voice louder, and he whines a high clean whine that holds me spinning. Ceiling twists, floor circles smaller, small. My hands over him stop. Suddenly he sleeps, he sleeps and we lie, all of us, in the hot dark house. Listen to him breathe.

The old man sells his truck, won’t take my money. He sees girls grind in city bars, knows how the money comes: my rooms, hotels, the avenue. The child’s sounds are whispers now; he sleeps too long. At the white hospital, us black against walls, they say the shunt in his head won’t drain. He won’t eat anymore, drinks from bottles, watches me; why do I come here. She hacks at the naked chicken on a board. Her face, the eye drawn; I moving away through the yard. This dust on my legs yellow as meal is burning, burning.

DUDE

She walks out through dirt yard to the road. I run, touch her arm. Her skin bare, dark walnut skin stained milky, and I
stand, my hand drenched in her skin, ask her, is she going back to El Paso. In the truck the land goes by us glaring as a lidless eye, sun a high glittering ring. Seeming to whirl in itself like hornets, it throws its heat on land laid out flat to the burning. We glide horizontal on a strip of road. In the tiny room of the truck I feel heavy in the rivery heat. Between us on the cracked seat a space gets small. Her satin skirt is faded in circles I could crush to my thumb. Under her heavy hair, her damp temples, I want to feel the shape of her skull. My hands are deaf. Eyes stony with light she watches me try to see the road, her opaled eyes seeming to come out at me yet falling back in their deep oil that scalds the side of my face.

I pull over, stop the truck, get out, lean against it. Up the road a café, all night lights still on, runs a lit band of letters around its roof: hamburgers, thick shakes, onion rings fried gold. I walk up there and a woman with her hair dyed brass swabs the counter with a rag. Her wide grin red, her front tooth gold, she lets me talk and counting change she fingers my palm.

Ice cream packed hard melts slow on my hands as I’m walking back. I see Rita hitching by the side of the road. I hand her a cone, get in the truck and start the engine. She climbs in. Motor idling, sweet cold in our mouths, I pull her across the seat and press my fingers hard at the base of her neck. My breath comes out a ragged curve against her eyes.

WATCHING

He so in love with her it was something to see. Dude so caught up and dedicated like a single eye to his own loving. How she touched it off. I suppose he was about to pack it in
before he saw her and thought there was still something to do. Walking up the hill, touching him with her hip and walking, she moved; her hip was delicate and blue beside his thigh.

This was El Paso, 1965. She danced in topless bars, said really she was a painter but she needed supplies. Supplies she said are always hard to get, sometimes you just have to put out and get them and go off with them. It was plain he wanted to go off with her but in the summer in El Paso it’s hard to move anywhere except down the street to the bars. I remember there was always dog puke on the sidewalks in El Paso. All those strays get the sweats around noon and bring up the garbage they ate in the back alleys of beanerys at dawn. Think about Texas and there’s those skinny fanned ribs heaving.

Dude used to go down to Bimpy’s nights and watch her dance. Bimpy was a greasy-kneed old faggot who liked him plenty and gave us free bourbon. She’d come over between songs and do a number with us, wringing with sweat so she’d wet the paper and we’d have to keep lighting it. She danced on this three-foot-square red stage, under two old ceiling fans that looked like little airplane propellers. She moved under their sleepy drone; always there was something about to break out. From our table in the corner I could smell the old roses smell of her. She was dark-haired and black-eyed though she swore she wasn’t Spanish, medium-sized but small-boned with green apple breasts; then suddenly her twisted child-bearing hips that were somehow off-center and rolled gentle to the left when she walked, rolling slow up the hill past the plate glass liquor stores. Dancing, she’d throw her dusty scent past the two old spots Bimpy had and the cowboys threw bills on the stage. Dude hated the dancing; said she was frigid as hell
afterward, like loving a wind-up doll except for her mouth and the curves it took on in the dark. She wouldn’t even move with the lights on, he said.

After the show she’d stay and help Bimp sweep up and then we’d walk out the door into the oily night. Everything wide awake and the fat yam-skinned women talking Spanish to their boyfriends, walking with their stemmed words and twined fingers past the blank-eyed 5 & 10’s. We’d walk up the hill, they in front and me trailing behind. She talked in her Texas voice about nothing usually, it just being important there in the lit-up black to have her voice with its honeyed drawl and bitter edge; she walking slope slide up the hill, whisper of her nylons brushing and the Mexican boys shooting craps on the sidewalk. They ain’t but thirteen, she’d say when they looked up at her heels clicking, Old enough. My daddy made a small fortune at craps. He used to call it dealin with the demon. She’d say that and slap Dude on the ass.

She’d boil those stark black Colombian beans on a stove in their flat and it’d heat up the kitchen so we’d have to sit out the window on the roof. By this time the town was near silent and steaming slow like a wet iron. Always drink hot coffee on hot nights, she’d say, Brings the sweat to the outside and lets you sleep. Dude dozed with his head in her lap and she’d turn to me, ask me, oils are on sale and could she borrow a few bucks till next week. You know, she’d say, twisting his hair in her fingers, Them stars are just holes in the sky after all. And while I’m sleeping in that hot bed everything I ever thought of having falls into em.

Finally I’d go to bed and hear them in the hall going back and forth to the bathroom, him usually drunk by then and tripping at the door. People up and down the hall behind doors yelled at him to shut up. Her arms reaching in the yellow
blouse to grab the light string, her hips moving in their funny bumbling slow walk past my door, not quite touching his legs, and the mosquitoes louder than her quiet laughter: this was 4
A.M
. in El Paso.

I saw him a couple of years later in Toledo, said he was into racing junk cars, said it was some kick. Said you’re tearing around and around under the lights in these things that are all going to fly apart and pile up. Said he heard she was living down in Austin with some dyke. Said cracking up those cars was great, said he was making money and cracking them up was some kick, it was really something.

BIMP

When I opened the place in ’46 I didn’t think no one could pull nothin over on me again. I was in the war just like anyone else, ain’t no one gonna tell me I got any debt. I had enough tin food and muddy boots and hair lice to last me. One goddamn big lie is what it was, I figured that out. There ain’t no losing or winning anywhere is what I figured out, ain’t nobody gonna pitch me into no fake contest again. I sailed into San Fran with a knee like a corkscrew and the salt air made it ache like a bitch. I came back home and opened the place and I figured I was standing ground. Back then the Mexicans used to skunk around at the alley door till I told em to beat it. I can see em now, slinking off in their red shirts under that one streetlamp between the trash cans. My own grandmother was a Mex. She smelled like a rotten cantaloupe and raved in Spanish about the goddamn Church that did nothin but bury her endless brats and the man that beat her. There ain’t no losing or winning. These black-eyed thieves and yellow Mex boys think I got something they
want, let em swagger in the front door so what. I could tell em if they ask—no matter what they got they got more to get and the thing don’t end. Gaining like a squirrel on a wheel, sure. When I saw them three kids I knew what the game was. Her saying what I needed was a dancer, the dude pretty as a rodeo star, and his sidekick one of them hunched-up watchers. I said Listen, I got me a dancer, and she said Try me out. The dude stood there grinding a butt into the floor in his high-heeled boots. I said Well I don’t allow no dancers in here without escorts, gets plenty rough in here ya know, this ain’t Philadelphia. She said she was from La Rosa, one of them dirt-eating border towns, and I laughed, said You didn’t get far didja. She smiled, her mouth dark pink and those flashy Spanish teeth strong as an animal’s. The cowboy finally looked at me, said, rolling the filter of his cigarette, We’ll be here at nine. The watcher stood there looking from face to face like he was judge of the whole damn game and I said Suit yourselves.

DUDE

Back then I was a carpenter like everyone. I quit school and went down to Texas, air so thick and slow it’s like swimming. That flat-out heat comes after you and drinks you up; she’d been there all her life. The steam in her; I lost what I was thinking in rooms thick, full of us; her black hair in the sheets a wound thread, thick black lines of drawings she kept hidden, her charcoaled fingertips. She worked on the avenue, turned tricks in a hotel room with a blue ceiling and one light bulb in a fringed shade. I told her she had to stop it and she said well, she’d dance but she wasn’t carrying no
slop to farmers in a beanery. The difference is, she said, I say how I’m used.

By noon those days I was a walking fever, my hands cut and sore from tarring feed store roofs, and since I first saw her I come into the heat the place the heat like a bitch dog and lived with it. When I got home it was late evening and she lay almost naked on the roof. Past crooked streets the tracks ran off white, cutting their light and crossing. Sluggish trains changed cars in the hard-baked yard. Beside her on the shingled heat, I smelled her salt skin and she laughed, pulled my face to her throat. We rolled, hot shingles pressed to my back, and later the shower was cold. We drank iced whiskey in jelly glasses and she danced up the hall dripping, throwing water off her hair. In the stifled space, window at the end painted over and light through the cracked paint patterned on the floor, her back was beaded and swaying. Water backed up past the drain spilled cold past my feet onto the floor and in our rooms we wet the sheets, slept in their damp. Her hair looped in my hands dried slow: past us the trains whistled their open howls.

It was too hot to cook and we ate avocados, jalapeños, white cheese. City lights came on, blue and pink neon stood out cool and she leaning into the mirror painted her face for the bar. I forget all of it but her lacquered eyes. And she stepping off the curb in those high-heeled shoes, kids in Chevys grinning.

Sometimes she came back from Bimp’s so late the light was coming up. Been with a john: she only did it she said when the money was too good to pass up. She’d come home with a bottle of brandy, get into bed with a pack of cards and we’d play poker to win till the sun was flat on the floor. Cards buckled finally and thrown against the wall, shades
drawn, we lay there see, until we could talk. Her face in the white bed, her face by the window; light behind the shade as she stood there colored her face blurred and fading like a photograph. It’s all right just come here.

BIMP

Like I said, I had another dancer. She was blond, from the East, up North I think. She had the look of someone didn’t sweat much, just burned a coal inside. Ran off finally with some slick Mex to Panama. Could tell easy she was one to leave home over and over till her feet wore down to a root that just planted where she ran out of steam. The men liked that white hair and light eyes and those rhinestone shoes she wore. She had that hard crumpled look of a dame that’s been around but don’t know why. I knew she was thirty-five but I hired her anyway. Them white blonds is scarce down here.

I put em onstage together the first night and they set up a wheel the whole place was turning on, what with the smaller one and her seventeen-year-old’s tits and them hips moving so you knew she’d been used since she was old enough to wiggle. Them border girls start with big brother in the alley, them towns full of female things dropping litters in the street. She moved with that clinched dark face, all of it a fist in her hips, and beside her the tall blond looked like a movie magazine none of em could touch. There was some kind of confusion, smelled like burning rubber. Spilt drinks and a goddamn brawl in the back at the card table. I got em offstage and turned up the lights and ordered everyone out of the place. Was just me picking up broken glass and the girls leaning by the bar and the two men dealing a hand at the
corner table like nothing happened. The girls were dressed, the blond fooling with her necklace, talking low. Her blue eyes drinking that Spanish mouth she say soft, Hey Honey, how long you figure on dancing with that swayback of yours and that funny hip—damn, can you get this thing fastened—no, here—Lemme put it on and you can maybe pinch it with your teeth—She leans over the Spanish, her red lips apart like she’s still talking, beer tipped in her hand and dripping all over their stockings. And the smaller one, black hair to her waist, hands midway in the air, stands there like a stone saying over and over, I can’t fix it, I can’t fix it.