Black Tickets (9 page)

After that I had em alternate nights and a week later the blond split. The cowboy and his sidekick was in here nights with the Spanish, the two of em diddling with cards and race forms in the corner. Figure it’s been ten years ago. Gave me a few good tips and then same as now—when I hit at the track I blow it all same night, ain’t nobody gonna tell me I won nothin.

THE BLOND

Rita. She left the avenue, the hotel, smell of urine and spent sex in the halls. We traded johns and other things; me by her door in blue light, cognac in my hand and my robe open. I asked her low, A toast to the hungry jokers? mouth on my raised glass and she let me in …

She let on like we never knew each other, but them hot nights I told her stories. Like how it was when I was seventeen like her. Ginette Hatcher was my name then, in Maine all the gray years. She born and died in Maine, she dying there still I guess. I took the name the first truck driver gave me, called me Babe and I answered to it ever since. I left my
husband that I only saw in the dark after the boats came in or before they went out, that man always cold and fish slime on his hands. I left soon as the baby was born, thinking the best anyone could tell the kid was that Mama took off. There something out there besides that gray wet, that heavy roll. My cousins and uncles was all lobstermen ever since I can remember. My dad too, but he died when I was so young all he is to me is a furred chest and smell of oiled rope. He died of lobster is what Mom said, and she killed hundreds of them. Scratch-clink of those claws against the boiling pot was a woman sound, a metallic scratch round as rings.

Wind and rock and weeds on the beach a gray stink, no color cold; I kept fish eyes in bottles and sold them all summer to the tourists, to the queers and dandies and the painted old things with poodles. Once an old woman with money asked me to come to her hotel and read the Bible to her. She opened it and I started in. After a while I looked up and she was staring out the window like a sleepwalker, her old hat in her lap. She said what a blessed child I was to come to womanhood here by the sea, so far from heat and corruption. I said Yes Ma’am. The fire comes from the feet, she said, from the walkers and the black hair. She didn’t see me anymore. I grabbed my sweater and ran home across the hotel beach, the big umbrellas blind and rolling on their sides. I found twenty dollars folded in my pocket and I bought me some red patent leather spike heels. I hid them in my room and only put them on at night and I was the walker walking and the dancer dancing in my fiery feet, and holes in the floor where I burned through.

Tires on the big trucks burn. You smell them in the cab, smell the motor boiling; my suitcase wedged between my knees and the truckers touching my dress. I lived everywhere and been to Mexico. I danced mostly, waited tables,
worked in a library once and couldn’t feel my feet for the shiny floor. Down in Texas any man on the street would buy me supper. By the time I got to Bimp’s those nights I was already loaded. Blur, dark oiled skins past the lights, ice in glasses. Cold melts in a circle, hot whiskey, hot Texas. And Rita shows up, so smooth and so hot; eyes like black glass, sunk in, burned young. Onstage she scared me, made that cold ocean roll in my head … then the lights were on, jeers from the floor, and that little pimp pushing us stumbling into the dressing room. Where I lean against the wall and watch her shaking by the sink, cold water on her wrists, and we look at each other. They say the world ends in fire and ice; I say it’s already over. That hot pavement burns you straight through; that’s why I did it, kept moving—no slow cooking and my claws raking walls. These streets, raunchy brass, my feet on fire burns up that dead ice.

I split way south with a rich dude. Red birds and black-eyed men. Been some since then. I’m doing OK, I got it made, and the cold don’t come so much now.

RITA

I lived with Dude those months in two rooms, rickety bed on blocks and past the windows the roof steamed between shingles. Long afternoons I cut the thin tar bubbles with my nails, oils warm on the paper, and the tubes heated till their lettering came off in my hands. I drew the trains: red gashes and the tracks black rips underneath. His hands felt furred with dust. When he was roofing, tar smudged the lines and crosses in his palms, left the whorls of his fingers and their black smell on my hips. Some days we stayed in bed, kept the fans turning, buzzing; we had cold wine and coarse
brown bread. At night the bars were crowded with drunks, some of them sick in the heat. Dancing, I didn’t watch them; I saw the flat brushed land outside the house in La Rosa, looking tawny-colored from the shaded rooms, but out there, walking, you felt hard hot sand and the color spreads into a wasted brown.

I think of what happened and it happens each time the same way. When I go back they are padding the cart with skins. Inside in his bed the child’s face is drawn and blue. He breathes faint strangled bleats and my mother waits, sewing pelts to wrap him. At dark she feels his throat and says there’s no breath; we leave with the cart. In the skins his face is white and his light hair long as a girl’s. The hitched mule swings its head, flares nostrils at the fresh smell and moves skittish toward the hills. The old man bends in brimmed hat, shuffles to low chant, and she walks behind, scatters fine powder on the ground. Cart rocking slow and the child’s face in my lap is sunken, lids on rolled eyes tight closed. All night we keep moving on the sloped land. Sand rolls its barren striped bars; the sky is inked and slashed in the foothills where we stop, take bundled wood from the cart, tie it with cords. She knots leather in the dark and the old man’s voice is hoarse. At dawn she piles brush and the corded wood; we lift the child, straining, jangling the bracelets on his arms. She lights dried skins wrapped on a stick, touches him, and he starts to burn. The wood catches and through the fire I think I see his face move. It moves again and I throw her back, digging, clawing at the hot wood under him. They watch me try to reach him, now he is all fire. Running around the stench I fall and their old faces over me say I only dreamed it. I smell the skins and his flesh, the incense burning under him.

Mule leading then down the ravine to where the light
stretches out on land like a smooth film of egg. I stumble and touch the animal’s hide, feel ribs under stiff mousy hair. The old man walks ahead, his back a leathered board under cloth. She stays there by the smell until it is finished; quiet, she waits to take the bones.

Hours walking, sun high and the road a sudden empty strip. The old man waits for me, then turns in the glare and tells me again that I dreamed it. I see his knife and serape on his waist, know he’s not going back for her. I won’t go back to her either. Smoke in my mouth, I smell the wheeling birds and the tight white face behind the bristled fire. Old man walking away on the road with his mule and there are trucks, horns, voices, Baby wanna ride?

DUDE

I remember the rains had started, blown in off the Gulf. She’d been to La Rosa. Always when she came back she was this hunted dog, stringy and gutted and ready to gnaw its own foot. I came in and she was walking circles in the room, rubbing her hands. I saw her fingers were torn, bruised purple under the nails. The rolled drawings were torn and smoldering on the floor. I moved to stomp them out and heard her moan, turned, saw matches in her hands; she striking and tossing them in the air where they’d flare and fall smoking. I grabbed her arms and everything was breaking, chairs cracking on the floor and the light bulb splintering. I saw her hair on fire under my hand and I rolled her onto the bed. All the time she moaned long and low like I wasn’t there except that this thing was on top of her. Her eyes were calm and her burned hair broke in my hand. I pulled her down and heard my breath coming high and watered like a woman’s; she fell
and lay there, her lips moving. She drooled and the spit flecked red where her teeth had cut. I stood over her and yelled for her to see me. Her eyes rolling past me pulled my hands to her clothes and the cloth ripped. I slapped her, kept slapping her and my hands were fists. I looked up and he’s watching us—always goddamn watching us—then he is talking quietly and pulling her from under me.

WATCHING

He was ramming his fists into the floor beside her head but he thought he was hitting her and asked me later had he killed her. The floor was splintered, fine wood in his hands, and she under him stared glazed at the ceiling. Her mumbled Spanish mixed in the room with the sulfur smell of something burned. When I pulled her from under him I saw her hair was burned ragged and her shirt seared in the back. I took it off and wrapped her in blankets; she was shivering. There was broken glass and her fingers were bloodied somehow. She kept talking to nothing, tossing her head from side to side, hands clinched in my hair so tight that when I lay her down I can’t move from her. Have to bend over her, my face close though she doesn’t see me; I touch her lips, the cuts scabbing and her teeth flecked with the dull dried blood. I smell her breath coming shallow and fast, say her name over and over until she hears me. Almost focusing she slides her hands slow from my hair down my face to her breasts, holding them.

Late that night, Dude sits by the window. Rain spills in; he watches the smoky trains jerk in the yard, moisture on warm soot a fine dust in the air. He blinks like he’s slapped
when he hears her clutch her throat and turn in her sleep. I talk, Dude smells her on his split knuckles, and the streaked curtains move all night.

Toward morning he paced the room, circling from door to window. Hands held delicate, he looked at me. His eyes I think were gray and heavy-lashed; the lid of the right one drooped and softened that side of his face. Finally he turned and left; his pointed boots tapped a faint click on the stairs each step down.

She woke up in twisted blankets and raised her fingers to her face. We ate the bread slow, her mouth bleeding a little. I’m seeing her in summer by the stove in their room, sweat clouding her hair and her lips pursed with cheap wine; she smoothing her cotton skirt and throwing back her hair to bend over the burner with a cigarette, frowning as the blue flame jets up fast. On the street under my window she is walking early in the day, tight black skirt ripped in the slit that moves on her leg. Looking back she sees me watching and buys carnations from the blind man on the corner, walks back, tosses them up to me. She laughs and the flowers falling all around her are pale, their long stems tangling. The street is shaded in buildings and her face turned up to me is lost in black hair. She is small and she is washed in grilled shadow.

Fingers too swollen to button her shirt, she asked me would I get her something to soak them in. At the drugstore buying antiseptic and gauze I felt her standing shakily by the couch, touching her mouth with her purple fingers. Walking back fast I knew she was gone, took almost nothing. The ashed drawings were swept up and thrown probably from the window. He left for good soon after, thirty pounds of Mexican grass stashed in the truck for a connection in
Detroit. I went as far north as I could get, snow that winter in Ottawa a constant slow sift that cooled and cleaned a dirt heat I kept feeling for months; having nothing of her but a sketch I’d taken from where she hid them: a picture of trains dark slashed on tracks, and behind them the sky opens up like a hole.

H
ER NAME
is Joyce Casto and she rides our school bus. The Castos all look alike. Skinny, freckled, straw-haired. Joyce’s is the color of broom sage, dried out by some heat in her head. She walks the halls of the junior high with a clipboard of ruffled papers, transistor radio beating in her hand.

Daddy is a fire-and-brimstone preacher at a church out the dirt road. Music is the work of a devil that licks at her legs. She stands, radio pressed to her face, lips working. Undah the boardwalk, down by the sea ee ee ye eh eh, Ona blanket with my baybeh’s where I’ll be.

She walks into class fumbling to turn it off. Stays close to the wall and watches the cement floor. She never talks to the country kids. The town kids never talk to her. The gym teacher finds out she is pregnant. Yes, she confesses, It was my brother. He’s went off to the mills.

She disappears from school but comes back a month
later, having had it in a bloody way. She rolled up a horse blanket and walked to the field. Daddy thundering I won’t lay eyes on your sin and big brother in Youngstown, holding a thing that burns orange fire. She rolls, yelping, dogs come close and sniff. They circle. The sky circles. Points of light up there that sting. Finally she sees they are stars. Washing herself in the creek she remembers the scythe against the grass, its whispering rip.

Next morning she sits in the house alone while the others shout and sweat at a revival in Clinger’s Field. The dogs come in with pieces in their mouths. She stands in the kitchen shaking while the Drifters do some easy moanin.

W
E WENT
to the movies every Friday and Sunday. On Friday nights the Colonial filled with an oily fragrance of teenagers while we hid in the back row of the balcony. An aura of light from the projection booth curved across our shoulders, round under cotton sweaters. Sacred grunts rose in black corners. The screen was far away and spilling color—big men sweating on their horses and women with powdered breasts floating under satin. Near the end the film smelled hot and twisted as boys shuddered and girls sank down in their seats. We ran to the lobby before the lights came up to stand by the big ash can and watch them walk slowly downstairs. Mouths swollen and ripe, they drifted down like a sigh of steam. The boys held their arms tense and shuffled from one foot to the other while the girls sniffed and combed their hair in the big mirror. Outside the neon lights on Main
Street flashed stripes across asphalt in the rain. They tossed their heads and shivered like ponies.

On Sunday afternoons the theater was deserted, a church that smelled of something frying. Mrs. Causton stood at the door to tear tickets with her fat buttered fingers. During the movie she stood watching the traffic light change in the empty street, pushing her glasses up over her nose and squeezing a damp Kleenex. Mr. Penny was her skinny yellow father. He stood by the office door with his big push broom, smoking cigarettes and coughing.