Need (3 page)

A pinch-mouth man he was, stiff as one of his own wooden Indians, though he wore feathers and warpaint for the St. Patrick’s Day parade and solid plastic peace-pipes for a living, ate animal crackers for his breakfast, still he called his daughter a whore. Which was a lie, she ran a little wild was all.

Still it was one thing, and then it was another thing, throwing up on Monsignor Bayliss, driving the Bentley into the swimming pool, sniffing coke with the hired help, nothing more than rites of passage really, but Chief Wigwam took it personally, he said it was like to kill him, and so it did, right in
the middle of lunch, he was eating alphabet soup and suddenly turned purple, rose halfway out of his chair, “You have to be kidding,” he said, and fell dead as he’d lived, face-down in his soup where Anna found him, fresh home from Mrs. Sweetwater’s, you wouldn’t believe the guilt.

Such a start it gave her, even after the funeral and all she couldn’t seem to settle, let alone go back to Charleston, she didn’t even want to dance, only moped around Camp Pocahontas with its turrets and colonnades, vine-draped balconies, English maze and Chinese pagoda, which was how one day by the boating pond with all the azaleas in bloom she met a boy called Chase trying to float a canoe. And this boy, he was half-naked, just shorts and sneakers with earth-brown hair down past his shoulders and his flesh the same burnt brown, not tan but burnished like something wild, maybe dangerous. “Nice day,” said Anna, and the boy looked back at her across the glittering pond, blinking sweat out of his eyes, his face smeared black with ashes or grease. “Nice enough,” he said, and Anna was lost.

In those days, of course, she was loveliness itself, a racehorse all sinew and nerve, long dancer’s muscles and her ass so pert, so spry she could carry a full cup of Earl Grey tea on its shelf and never spill a drop. Hardly even a drop.

In the middle of the pond on a rock was the concrete pagoda where Chief Wigwam had stored the feathers for his headdresses in a massive copper vat bigger than most houses. So they paddled their canoe, they eloped. Inside the pagoda was a balcony with a wrought-iron railing that circled maybe twenty foot above the vat full of feathers and when you looked down it was like drowning in colours, every bright shade in creation. But Chase didn’t look, did not even glance, just put one hand on the rail and vaulted off into space, spinning down all arms and legs into the copper maw, feathers
flew up in a fountain, the vat’s sides roared like the noise-maker backstage in
Macbeth
at Mrs. Sweetwater’s during the witches’ sabbath, and still he went down, rolling tumbling on his belly, on his back, on his fool head, sucked in deeper and deeper as if magnetized till he was socketed snug, enwombed you’d say if you were that way inclined, and everything resettled except for one green feather, halfway between chartreuse and aquamarine, that drifted on high, wafted right into Anna’s hand.

What could she do? What choice did she have? Climbing up on the railing, she dived herself, a jack-knife with tuck, 2.5 degree of difficulty, with such perfect form that she made not a splash when she went under, she just went down down down and did not come up.

Not for days, weeks, months. There must have been moments when they surfaced for food or bodily functions, there had to be, but she had no memory of that, no sense of anything outside the vat where time had no function, nothing did, except for the great banks of feathers floating and drifting, then swirling in slow swelling waves, in all of their savage colours with all those savage names, carnelian and gamboge, plumbago and azulene, heliotrope curcumine miloro, indigo malachite verdigris prune. And even today after thirteen years, there were some mornings when Anna passed through Ferdousine’s Zoo on her way to work, when Kate Root was feeding the birds and some caique or painted bunting began to strut and spread its wings, luxuriate, then she had to bite her hands, count to ten, not to fall on it bodily and rip out the brilliance in her bare hands, rub it into her face, her belly, her cunt, for all those times she’d twined herself on him like a standing tree, dark and dangerous, and Chase when he spunked, he cried out in tongues,
Alas, alas the great city
, he said.

It had seemed an odd thing to mention.

Or maybe not. The way of the world these days, maybe it was just common sense. This very evening, coming out of Downey’s after the wake, her passage had been blocked by two boys, they hardly looked old enough to jerk off, intoning through a megaphone,
And I stood upon the sands of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of Blasphemy:
“What could their mothers be thinking of?” Anna said.

But Willie made no reply. He hardly ever did. Nights like this she wondered why he bothered showing up. When he couldn’t seem to abide her, could hardly tolerate her kiss or even touch. Just stood there like a parking meter waiting to be fed, and what did she do, like an idiot of course she fed him. Kept reaching out and babbling,
guess what you’ll never guess
, it was so sick. Gushing like a flushed John, or the lapsing unsoilable sea, and all for what? A handful of gimme, a mouthful of much obliged.

When he wasn’t even her style.

That’s what she kept forgetting. That she was a dancer, and a dancer was an athlete, and an athlete belonged with other athletes. Weightlifters and jocks were her speed, prize-fighters, truck-drivers even, great slabs of meat with abs and glutes and pecs, deltoid development. Men with loose sloppy grins and red hands that picked her up bodily, could toss her like a cow-chip. Dumb animals, that only knew one dumb-animal thing. Not this halfhand runt that thought he was Kid Signify, Man of Power, when he was only …

 … beautiful, she guessed.

Well, agreed. But lovely like a girl, a maiden, a fucking
damsel
for God’s sake, with those almond-slanted odalisque’s eyes wet and sticky as molasses, and the olive flesh that glinted
pale blue and green by her bedside light so that he looked amphibian, a fishboy, and even his dick hermaphrodite almost, slithering and sly, serpentine.

But his hair. That was the item she couldn’t slide past,
the gaoler of her soul
, whose poem was that? Midnight-black and racehorse-sleek, silk when she ran it through her fingers, cotton candy when she puffed it high in a pompadour, black wings when she lost herself, “Who does the bitch think she is?” Willie said.

“Which bitch?”

“The blowfish. The bag with the bird.”

“What about her?”

“Who does she think she is?”

“I never asked,” said Anna Crow. “She wouldn’t tell me if I did.”

“So how come you said she was a witch?”

“Just something I heard, don’t ask me where, or maybe I made it up, I probably did, the way she looks at you on the stairs, never blinking, that white moon face with no more expression than Monterey Jack, could you blame me?”

The drunk sailor with tasselled bra dangling from his ear like a crooked lampshade pinched the fat dancer’s ass on his way through to the men’s room or rather Pointers as the sign said at Sheherazade, the women’s said Setters, that was the kind of place this was, and Anna squealed extra loud to change the subject. Because if there was one topic she certainly did not intend to waste her night discussing, that topic was certainly Kate Root, the old bat,
the bag with the bird
, she must remember that.

Six nights a week she danced in this dump herself, she was Zenaide from Zonguldak, the Turkish Typhoon, but this was her night off, she didn’t know what she was doing here. “Fly me to the moon,” she said. “Failing that, Chez Stadium.”

It was their place. A dingy dark haven of leatherette and naugahyde, with clouds of nylon butterflies glued to the lowering ceiling, their spread wings bright with glitterdust, and every time your waitress brought you a fresh drink, a shower of sparkle shook loose, gold and blue, that drifted down like dandruff to settle on your shoulders, in your glass.

The men that gathered here had names and games out of some bad thriller, Mouse Williams and Sandman Ames, Deacon Landry, Warren White, Willie called them entrepreneurs, but Anna knew what that meant, panders with pretensions was all. The style of older men who were not riper, simply older. New Jacks past their sell-by dates, festooned with gold chains and bracelets, and the hostess dressed up in tights and tails, her name was Shanda Lear.

The word, she guessed, was
louche
.

In Charleston that time she’d danced in a revue at the Low Country called
Louche Lips Sink Ships
and the Citadel cadets charged the stage in a flying wedge, she thought they’d tear her limb from limb, “I could use a kiss,” she said. “Anna wants a little kiss.”

“About the carwash …” said Willie D.

“Just fucking hold me would do.”

“What I was thinking, it needs an angle, some kind of tease, to make it stand out. Maybe dressing the girls up like flowers and when the water hits them the petals fall off.”

“What kind of flowers?”

“I thought roses would be nice. Pink and yellow roses in layers. But then I thought, the cost. So what about lilies? And change the name to fit? Call it Tyger’s Topless Carwash. Spelled ‘y’ for a touch of class. Then the girls could be Tyger’s Lilies.”

“Love it,” said Anna. “Just love it to death.”

The way Chez Stadium was lit, there was only one weak bulb per booth, hardly more than a nightlight shaped like an ice-cream cone and painted rose-madder, the colour of the Painted Desert at Sunset in a Forties postcard, and its glimmer fell slanting across Willie’s temple, directly onto the bridge of his broken nose where it thickened, where there was a faint reddish welt shaped like an arrowhead.

Of all of him it was the fragment that Anna craved most, the flaw that completed him. Across the booth while Willie droned on about Tyger Lilies and how every man had to start some place, even giants began with baby-steps, like Lincoln splitting rails and Elvis driving a truck, Berry Gordy was an autoworker, even Deacon Landry had been a messenger once, she could hardly follow the words for aching, the hunger to touch it, squeeze it dry.

The arrowhead was upside down, pointing up. When Shanda Lear brought Willie’s Pernod and blackcurrant, her wig dislodged a speck of glitterdust that landed on the arrow’s tip, clung there like a gilded snowflake.

It looked just like a scab.

And scabs were Anna’s passion. Squeezing blackheads was good, sucking the poison out of bee stings was better, but scabs were best. Those years she was married to Padgett when he shucked oysters, he’d used to come home nights with his money hand a jigsaw of nicks, whittles, slashes, and she preyed on him like a buzzard, no band-aid could keep her off, curses neither, it was love.

“Warren White raised gerbils on Staten Island, Mouse Williams licked stamps,” Willie said, and he knocked back his drink in one, a sudden rush of alcohol that raised his body-heat. His cheeks and throat flushed, his nose likewise, causing the speck of glitterdust to melt, fuse with the arrowhead
beneath, and the red welt seemed to swell and harden as Anna watched. Not that she was that way inclined, of course, but still and all she was human, and girls would be boys sometimes in Mrs. Sweetwater’s dorms, they couldn’t help themselves, nor could she. So her fingers snaked out of their own accord and felt the swollen nubbin, no bigger than a gnat, “Pardon me,” Anna said, she heard herself say. “You have a clit on your nose.”

Willie didn’t hit her. All he did was look in her face. Examine the skin that was thirty-three, well, call it twenty-nine, but already too taut across the cheekbones, she knew, too slack around the mouth, too many blue veins too close to the surface, any day one would burst, and then where would she be? Not with Willie D, that’s for sure. Not trapped in those black sticky eyes and his stillness that was not really stillness at all, more a furious containment: “Sandman Ames sold enemas door to door,” he said.

Uptown somewhere in the Barrio there was a cockfight scheduled. Deacon Landry had a bird showing, so did Warren White. When they left Chez Stadium for the pit, Willie followed behind.

All the way up inside the red Spyder he never spoke, just kept pushing the rocker switch, making all the windows go up and down, the roof retract and swing back, while a voice on the tape-deck with sugared plums in its mouth intoned an ode to empowerment, and Anna mended her mouth. “Would you look at those fires! Oh God, I never saw the like,” she said, but that was a lie, one year she’d been in Detroit for Devil’s Night when the whole city burned like a tinderbox, two hundred fires at once, three hundred, four, in lumber yards and abandoned buildings, slum properties the landlords had torched for the insurance, warehouses and factories, shelters, it was a holocaust, and the beauty took your breath away.

The cockpit was set up in a disused gymnasium behind the Kanawah Political Club, the pit surrounded by rough wooden walls and five rows of bleachers so steep you seemed to look straight down on the birds as they warred.

At three in the morning when Willie streeled in, Anna two steps behind, a Tulsa Red was fighting a Butcher Boy. The moment their handlers unloosed the cocks they flew straight at each other and met in the middle air, the steel gaffs like spurs flashing on the stumps of their legs. For a few seconds they were merged in a tangle of feathers and bloodied plumes, indivisible, then the Red was on top, the Butcher Boy was falling spinning on his back, one of the Red’s gaffs had pierced his right eye, he was dead before he hit the ground.

“Cordova’s Red wins. Nineteen seconds of the third pitting,” the referee declaimed. The bleachers were a green wash of banknotes, somebody threw a bottle against a wall, the explosion sounded like a petrol bomb going off, and in the pit the Red pecked idly at the Butcher Boy’s draggled head, crowed his victory.

In Savannah when she was a schoolgirl cockfights had been for crackers and niggers, they did not occur on Victory Drive. Anna nibbled at her black nails for comfort. Deacon Landry was watching her. “Popped your cherry?” he asked, not unkind, a coffee-coloured man with a diamond pinkie ring and a porkpie hat, one eye squinted against invisible smoke. Perched on his wrist preening was the cock of his dreams.