Little Cat (19 page)

They were flat-lipped, screaming,
Let us in!

I was trying to scream too,
Keep driving! Keep driving!
But nothing came out. We must’ve run over something. There was a dragging sound. I turned and I saw there was blood on the road printed behind the tires. Air bubbles started popping in my chest. I knew there was someone dying underneath us. God, get away! I was trying to wake up.
Get away! Get away!

‘Shhh!’ Gio was gripping my shoulder.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Calm down. You’re okay.’

Gio took his hand off me and slowly rubbed his face and chin. I was trying to focus on his face, the hairy outline of a man. He reminded me of John, of Ezrah, of Michael, my dad – the way all men’s cheeks are rough and black.

‘I sent the children out a few months ago,’ Gio said. ‘I knew it was going to get worse in the city.’

‘What?’

Gio glanced over at me. ‘I have a woman at the house who takes care of them when I’m not there.’

I realized that Gio had draped a coat around me while I was sleeping. The coat had slipped down to my waist. Gio kept turning his head to look at my tits. I stared straight ahead and slit my eyes. I felt my nipples through my shirt. I wanted to make myself feel them even more. His staring was making heat flash through my tits.

‘I had to take my children from the city. Their mother left them alone in this wasteland.’

I just wanted him to keep staring at me, I wanted these feelings in my breasts to continue. I wanted liquid to spurt out of them. I was with a man who had come to my bed twice. A man I didn’t make pay. The man who fucked Adi up. Who brought her here. Who sold her here. God, what exactly was I trying to find out about a man? I felt like a man myself, a compartment – amoral.

The trees beside the road were getting thicker, all the trunks stacked in the same darkened lines.

‘She was a little like you, their mother.’

I didn’t know why I thought I was in love with this fuck!

‘Relax, Mira,’ Gio said softly.

I closed my eyes. My stomach was made of soft shit. We drove on in silence, the trucks, the trains and us.

I started thinking about Ezrah. It was his birthday soon, the tenth of October. I thought I might call him. I just wanted him to know that I remembered. But I was too embarrassed to call or too mad to call, maybe too gone, too amoral to call. I didn’t even know which thing I was more.

Why couldn’t Ezrah like me no matter what I did? What if I cleaned trash from the streets for a living? What if I was legless, leprous, contagious? Why couldn’t he love me just because I worked at the club? Just because I had sex with strange men, is that a reason he shouldn’t love me? I could say it over and over, every which way:
Why don’t you love me with come on my hands? Why don’t you love me legs spread for the crowd?

I don’t love you
, Ezrah would say to me,
because this isn’t you.

Yeah? Who am I? You tell me who I am.

The Mira I knew when I was a kid, the Mira I want when I’m feeling alone.

So what’s the problem?

There’s shit on your knees, it’s all over your knees.

Fuck you, Ezrah. There’s no shit on my knees.

Only I can see it. You can’t see that genre of shit.

I knew he would say something like this.

Or:
Jism is not invisible, Mira.

Oh, go fuck yourself, Ezrah. And fuck your jism-flecked birthday!

‘Who do you pray to, Mira?’

Gio’s voice woke me.

‘Nobody,’ I said.

‘That’s not true.’

‘It is. I hate God.’

‘Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.’

My eardrums beat blood.

‘While you were asleep, you were crying for God.’

‘I was not.’

‘Yes you were. You were crying, “God, God!”’ Gio imitated my voice. He seemed to be getting more comfortable with me or something.

I stared at the road. The road never changed. ‘Look, I’m not religious,’ I said.

Gio laughed. ‘Do you know how the Christians pray?’

I remembered Nadia Russian Orthodox in her taffeta skirt. They dress up for God to respect him, she’d said.

‘Yes or no?’

‘No.’

Gio rolled down the window to let in some air. It started whistling over our heads.

‘The Christians pray,’ he said slowly, ‘to believe in the flesh of Jesus Christ: the real man, with real blood.’

I felt weird that he’d just said
Jesus Christ
. The heat in my body had all gone away.

Gio shifted around on his seat. It was like he was trying to scratch inside his back. ‘When a Christian girl kneels before the priest,’ he said, ‘the body of Jesus is put in her mouth. She says:
Hoc est enim corpus meum
. You know what that means? Come, say it with me.’

I thought he was joking. Nadia would’ve told me about that! A girl on her knees before the priest who puts Jesus’ body inside her mouth?

‘
Hoc est enim corpus meum
. Come, say:
Hoc est enim corpus meum
.’

‘No.’

‘Mira.’

Gio was so stern that I laughed.

‘Okay, okay.
Hoc est enim corpus meum
.’

‘Good. “This is my body.” Say it.’

‘This is my body.’

I looked down at my chest. My nipples were big again.

‘And when the priest holds up the goblet of wine, he says,
Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei
. Say it.’

‘
Hic est enim calix sanguinis
… ?’

‘Mei.’

‘Mei.’

‘“This is my blood.” Say it.’

‘This is my blood.’ My gut rumbled.

‘“Except you who eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” John 6:53.’

Gio looked at me and nodded, as if I knew what he was saying. But I’d never heard this kind of thing before. I didn’t know anything about Jesus Christ.

‘The Christians pray,’ Gio continued, ‘because Jesus was a real man. He had a real body and real blood. The Christians pray because Jesus showed them his body, his unclothed body pierced with nails, so that they could look at his wounds and remember their own.’

Gio stretched his huge fingers over the steering wheel. Yeah, Jesus was crucified, that much I knew.

‘The very first time I met the mother of my children,’ Gio said, looking over at me briefly, ‘she wanted to kiss me, she wanted to “do it.” But I knew that I would be an animal with her. I didn’t want to be an animal with her. I was going to grip her neck and sink my teeth in … ’

Something was changing inside the car. There was this electricity between us again. I reached out and touched Gio’s neck. Soft baby hairs flattened down on the skin.

‘I couldn’t stand that she was doing the same thing to all those other animals.’

We turned off onto a smaller highway. Gio stopped talking. He let me work out the kinks in his neck. I felt him start to relax in my grip. When we were kids – of course I remembered this now – Nadia told me that Jesus was killed by the Jews. Suddenly Gio twitched and something cracked in his neck. My hand flew off and stuck to my lap.

‘You, as a Jewish girl, cannot so easily be a whore, am I correct?’

Oh my god. Why the fuck was he so shocked about me?
He
was the one who came to my room.
He
was the one who was a smuggler pimp!

‘It has nothing to do with being Jewish,’ I said.

Gio ignored me. He took out a handkerchief from his pocket. He pressed it to his open mouth. It looked like he licked something off it.

‘Do you know why God told the prophet Hosea to marry a whore?’

‘I think I should get out,’ I said. ‘I just told you I was not a whore.’

Gio accelerated.

‘Why would God tell the prophet Hosea to marry a whore? Would many men want to marry a whore?’

‘I don’t care, okay? I want to get out!’

Gio swallowed, his throat bulged. ‘They’d be disgusted. Why?’

‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,’ I muttered.

‘God forced Hosea to marry a whore,’ Gio said, ‘because being with a woman who’d slept with so many was the only way to show him the real way to love.’

Hate
, I thought.
Hate
.

‘You think this is easy for a man, Mira?’ Gio went on. ‘“For she is not my wife,” said Hosea, “neither am I her husband: let her therefore put her whoredoms out of her sight, and her adulteries from between her breasts, lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst … ”’

‘Fuck off! I don’t care about Hosea. A man is the one who helps a woman be a whore!’ I screamed.

Gio smiled and attacked the road. ‘You’re right. And Hosea was obeying God by taking the whore as his wife. Her name was Gomer. Hosea and Gomer.’

I imagined Adi and Gio twisted around each other. Gio and Adi on the seats of this car.

‘“I will discover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers,” said Hosea, “and none shall deliver her out of mine hand.”’

Gio gripped the steering wheel so hard now that his knuckles had turned white.

‘Hosea had to pay another man to get Gomer back. He loved her and still she kept on being a whore. He loved her and still she didn’t want to be with him forever. The Hebrews need to know these things about their Bible.’

I realized the car was veering onto the shoulder. We’d slowed down too quickly and dust was rising all around us. Gio got out of the car and slammed the door hard. He walked to my side and started knocking on the window. His eyelids seemed peeled back, his white eyes were bulging. He was struggling to open my door, but I was holding it tight.

‘Get out. Open up! You wanted to get out!’

I didn’t know him. I didn’t know this man at all.

Gio stormed around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. His shirt was soaking under the arms. All of a sudden, I let the door swing.

Gio was back in front of me now, breathing hard.

‘Get out, I said.’

It got cold inside my forehead. Why was he yelling? I thought my face was showing I was afraid.

‘Just get out of the bloody car!’

A pearly white dress unfolded from his fist. It was swinging between us. Still I couldn’t move. Gio’s hand came down for my wrist. The second he touched me, I flew up, I don’t know how.

‘That’s better, Mira.’

I was standing there in front of him. My horrified breaths. Gio lifted my shirt up over my head. His thick fingers reached behind me and unhooked my bra.

‘I don’t know why you always wear this thing. I like it better when your breasts hang loose.’

Gio watched my nipples stick out in the air. Then he slid the dress onto me, arm into armhole, neck into head.

‘Now you look right.’

The dress was shiny, too tight at my sides. And I was itchy suddenly, as if there were hairs at my nipples.

‘Take off your panties.’

I stood there for a second, still breathing too hard. Then I started to turn away from him. I was slow, so slow that he probably couldn’t see I was moving. I was aiming to put my hands on the roof of the car.

Gio grabbed me roughly and spun me around. He jerked down my pants and underwear in one tug. The door handle was stuck between my legs. It was making me pulse. I felt him staring at the tilt of my ass. I pushed it out a little. It was the only thing on me that could move. Maybe I’d been waiting all day to fuck him. Maybe my body was dumb and it was telling me what to do. I flattened my breasts down hard on the window. The silky dress made me slide on the glass. I heard Gio’s zipper and a car racing by. Then he lifted the skirt of the dress. He felt between my legs. I was wet.

Gio pushed my panties to my ankles. I was stuck there dripping with them stretched and tied around me. Then the head of his cock hit the line of my ass. I wanted to tell him to just put it inside me, split me open, right open, fuck me right now. I bent my knees down to try and tell him to just do it, but Gio leaned his massive chest down, a big slab on top of me, pinning my wrists.

He breathed in my ear, ‘You’re the next. You’re the next.’

I got hotter and wetter.
Next, you’re the next.
I wanted to reach out and spread it, spread my ass wide, but my hands were locked tight.
Next, you’re the next.

I thought right then that he was going to be my husband and I was going to be his wife. I’d be a good wife, a great wife, a hot Jewish wife! I’d be the woman he’d been waiting for forever. The one he’d come home to every single day! I’d love him at home and suck him at home, bathe him and feed him and fill him at home …