Kiss of Noir (2 page)

I still stood on the court, breathing deeply and grinning. I felt like a hungry wolf. I was ready to force my team’s victory right here, right now, with a brawl. One of my players touched my shoulder.

“It’s over. Snap out of it. Come on.”

I shook her off. “I’m okay. Everything’s cool.”

Another of my players, a loose cannon herself, ran up. “Coach D, that was awesome!
Pow!
Goddamn, that was great! You’re my hero, giving that sniveling loser something she really deserved—”

“Shut up,” I barked. “Everybody to the showers! Now!”

My team filed out. I remained, alone in the middle of the court, waiting. Soon the president of the university, who always attended the games, the vice president, and my own assistant coach appeared out of the wings and approached me. They looked too solemn for me not to know what this meant. I shook my head, tasting blood. I lifted a weary hand to dismiss them. “You don’t have to say anything. I’m gone.”

“Miss Delaney—”

“That’s
Coach
. And really, I’ll just get my stuff and be out tonight. That way is easiest on all of us.”

“We need a termination meeting. Papers must be signed, there are loose ends…”

I looked at them, my anger ebbing and sad acceptance filling me. “Fuck all that. What will you do, fire me?” I sighed. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll go, no questions asked. Your problem is that you don’t know that sometimes a good punch is the right answer.”

No one said anything. I dug my fingers into my eyes. “It’s been a great ten years.” I sighed again. “I’ve done an excellent job, haven’t I?” I asked the president. Everyone else dropped his eyes.

“Well, this past year—”

“I’ve been the best, haven’t I?” I demanded.

The president stared at me for a moment, then softened and nodded.

“I knew it,” I whispered. “Thanks, you can go.” I turned and walked out, my head high.

The locker room was thick with steam. The Babel of women’s voices sweetened the steamy air. Women strode around in various stages of nudity.

“Hey, everyone! Come here, I have an announcement,” I shouted. The hush was sudden. My team gathered at once, one even running out of the shower, her hair still sudsy.

“Now, let’s not make this a big thing,” I said sternly, “but this is good-bye.” A chorus of protests rang in the humid air. I held up my hands. “Shut up. That’s the way it is. I’ve enjoyed working with all of you. Now just carry on. Remember what I’ve taught you and kick ass next year. I’ll be watching.”

I left in the shocked silence that followed.

DJ Nix, my star forward, surprised me by catching me before I leaped into my Wagoneer. “Go away, little girl,” I growled. “You heard the news. Beat it.”

“Coach,” DJ said so tenderly that it squeezed my wounded heart. I rolled my eyes, frowned, and waited expectantly.

“Coach,” DJ repeated. She reached out and held my limp wrist. DJ shrugged. “After all we’ve been through.”

I was ten years old again, struggling not to cry. “Yeah, so?” Gruff, that was the ticket. I jerked my arm out of DJ’s clasp.

DJ’s face hardened. She whispered fiercely,
“You owe us more than this!”

I stared at her as long as I could. Then I nodded, swallowed the dry baseball in my throat, wincing at the effort. I got in the vehicle, started the motor and rolled down the window. I sighed and looked at DJ, who stood with her hands balled into her pockets, tears streaming down her face.

“I know,” I said. “I know. But I can’t. This is all I’ve got.”

DJ’s mouth twisted as if she’d eaten lemon. “Fine.”

I sped off. I hated long good-byes. I wouldn’t stand for a bunch of emotional ninnies to cry and pour out their hearts. That would be too much. They had their whole lives ahead of them. Let them work it out amongst themselves. I didn’t want to be put on the rack of their grief. I had to regroup and form a new game plan, and fast. I was thirty-six now. What in the hell would I do with myself? Find another California college and start over from the bottom? I clenched my jaws. Absolutely not. The possibility that I might not even be wanted by anyone else in any capacity after this episode was a new, terrifying idea.

Well, I would just find a university on the East Coast and let my record speak for itself. There, that quick it was decided. I returned to my apartment and started packing, feeling stronger by the second.

I had turned on the television for noise company and the sports came on. I heard my name and turned, feeling stunned and boneless. There, big as life, was my fight with Camille. They replayed it, slo-moed it, and analyzed it from every direction. I grabbed the remote and switched channels. Nope, the bad news was on every single station. Some taking it as a harmless humorous prank among pros that provided much-needed excitement and some were seeing it as a racist confrontation and everything that was wrong with sports today. My blood drained from my body. I saw myself with that crazed grin on my face, ready to destroy the world. I cringed. I was so accustomed to the television cameras, I had forgotten they were there. I saw footage of the college’s faculty keeping the press away from me and a reluctant interview given by my assistant coach. I hadn’t even realized the administration had chased the reporters away or thrown them the bone of a dull, meaningless sound bite with the president.

My telephone started ringing. I grabbed my keys and headed for a bar.

I returned home hours later, sloppy and stumbling. I had gone to a dive across town that was purely for getting and staying drunk. There was no television, no pool table or dartboard, no dance floor. Just big swallows of hard liquor and pea soup smog of smoke and stale breath.

The men I sat with at the bar asked no questions. Their hands shook and their eyes were either focused inward or thousands of miles away. They were unkempt. These men obviously had no families, no sweet soft women caring for them. They had given up and no one came to see about them. The men had the sour odor of loneliness.

It made me so sad to sit among them that I drank doubles. Visions of The Redhead swam in my mind.

“Gin and tonic,” I said, my sober voice cutting through the weepy slurs. “Extra large, very strong.”

“Gin and tonic, huh?” The bartender grinned. “How’s Bombay?”

I was puzzled and irritated and glared at him. “If that’s what you’ve got, that’s fine. I don’t care,” I said. One of the two men I was sitting between was close to passing out. I tapped out a cigarette and lit it with one deft movement. The bartender stood still, seeming to wait. I looked up and noticed his gaze. “Do I need to beg?”

The light in the bartender’s eyes flickered and dimmed. He poured the drink and gave it to me. I laid a bill on the counter and squinted through my own smoke. “Thanks, man.” My cigarette bobbed with my words.

“You’re welcome.” The bartender smiled again. “Haven’t seen you in here before.”

“No, and God willing, you never will again.” I gulped my drink and looked around.

The bartender bristled. “Well, it’s not the Taj Mahal, but—”

I waved my hand and smiled. “No, no, man, relax. It’s perfect.”

“Enough about me,” he said. “So what do you do?”

“I drown my sorrows,” I snapped. Then I raised my drink and gulped the rest, jingling the ice. “What do you care?”

The bartender flinched. “Just making conversation. What’s your problem?”

I pushed my glass to him, nodding for a refill. “Double. And I have no problems. What makes you think I have a problem?”

“Oh, you have a problem. This is the last stop before hell.” The bartender set my second drink down hard and it splashed some.

“Yeah, I’ve got a problem.” I sighed. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”

The bartender shook his head and moved away to wipe a vacant counter section. I was able to drink in peace.

After I stumbled into my apartment, I collapsed in bed with my shoes on. To the bar stench that clung to me, I added my own nauseating miasma: rage, sweat, tobacco, gin, and lust. I tossed and turned, my stomach churning, my head spinning, and my mind numb with shock.

I needed a friend. Somebody strong, somebody I wouldn’t sleep with. I needed a brother. I staggered to my address book and looked up a name. I weaved back to bed and dialed the number. It was two hours later there.

“Who the fuck is calling me now?” Sloane’s voice was gravelly.

“Sloane Weatherly! S’me, Nora Delaney. ’Member?” I closed my eyes.

“Hmm, Nora, Nora…let’s see…hell yes, I remember you. You came in a hurry, left in a hurry, and Max still hasn’t calmed down.”

My eyes flew open. Max! Maybe I should go back to Tulsa and let Max, The Redhead, give me solace and soothe my wounds. I was too drunk and messed up to even fantasize about it. “That right?”

“What’s wrong with you, Nora?”

“Nothing that a new job won’t fix.”

“Oh, Lord, what have you done, fool?”

“You didn’t see the TV?”

“Nigga, I got a
life
. And I ain’t got no job for you. What do you want?”

I sighed. “I dunno, nothing, I mean, nothing I guess.”

“Don’t you have any people?”

“Nah.” I was wary. I wanted Sloane to know what I needed without my having to say it. “How’r you?”

“Are you drunk?”

I belched.

“Are you calling me in the middle of the night while you’re all drunk and shit? Pull your sorry ass together. This ain’t cool. Call me sometime when you’re sober.” Sloane hung up.

She was right. I frowned, feeling self-pity try to gather itself into tears. I wanted someone to tell me it was okay. I wanted someone to comfort me. I wanted someone to reassure me that I was all right. I placed the phone back in its cradle where it rested on my nightstand. I had a cell, but it lay dusty in a drawer. I still insisted on having one main landline that was an old-fashioned heavy black dial telephone with cords. It was substantial and satisfying—like I preferred my women. Big, sensual, smooth, and pleasurable to hold.

I rested, not sure what to do with myself. I felt the bed trying to pitch me off. The phone rang, startling me from the edges of a stupor. For the first time, I hoped it wasn’t a woman.

“Yeah?”

“T-Bone! That you? Saw your show on ESPN. Baby, you know how to hit!”

There was only one person who called me T-bone. “Ellis!” I sat up, my head spinning. “Hambone! What are you doing up so late?” I struggled not to slur.

“Oh, you know, just watching you scandalize yourself on national TV. I’ve laughed my ass off all night and Sayan is mad at you for making black folk look a fool, and when I argued, she kicked me to the couch.”

I rolled my eyes. Sayan was Ellis’s touchy proud wife. “What did you say?”

“I said that pasty ho had it coming and you were just there to deliver. Anybody could see that. She swung first! And someone would have beat her ass eventually, you were just at the front of the line. I say you did your people
good
.”

I lay back and smiled. “Oh, Hambone, you always know how to talk to your wicked cousin.”

“So what’s up now, you through?”

“You know it.”

“You drunk?”

“You know it.”

“That’s my T-Bone. Girl, get your ass down here. Let my wife fatten you up and let me whup your ass in some street ball.”

“You talk crazy, Ham.”

“Why? What you got keeping you there?”

I sludgily processed this. “Uh-huh.”

“So? Come down to the Crescent City and sponge off me for a while. You know I owe you.”

“Ellis, I told you then to forget about it and I meant it. You owe me nothing.”

“C’mon, I could use the company. You could be here eating pea and bone by tomorrow night.”

“Aw, Ham…”

Ellis’s voice was clear and firm. “I want you to come.”

I nodded in the darkness. “Thanks, Hambone, I’ll call from the road.”

“Great.”

I hung up and redialed Sloane. “Going to New Orleans to stay with my cousin.” My voice was sloppy.

Sloane laughed. “Who is this?”

“Aw, Sloane, I feel so bad. Tell Max—”

“No, man,” Sloane said roughly. “Tell her yourself.”

I closed my eyes, my stomach churning. “Right.”

“So who is this cousin?”

“Ellis Delaney. Mom’s sister’s son. Runs a pawn shop not far from New Orleans. Gonna take me in.” My voice cracked.

“Good. You take care, N. Don’t drink it all.”

“You got it.”

After I put down the phone, I ran to the bathroom and vomited until my belly was sore. When the heaves subsided at last, I scooted back and leaned against the wall and felt worse. My head was a little clearer but that only let me see that I was a butch who couldn’t hold a job, a woman, or my own liquor. I was nothing. I began coughing. I fumbled for a cigarette and lit it with my thumbnail against a match, taking small comfort in the warm friendliness of fire. My mouth tasted nasty and the smoke helped. I began shaking and leaned over the toilet to vomit and spit again. All the while, between my first two right fingers, the cigarette smoldered steadily. I started sweating and sat back again. Only religious when convenient, I muttered prayers and rested. I drew a cup of water and rinsed my mouth. I took a tentative swallow. I curled my body back into the tiled corner, huddling on the small cushion of rug, and spent the rest of the night dozing, waiting for sobriety to return.