The Girl With the Golden Shoes (11 page)

“And you, my love, are a beautiful, beautiful girl.”

“How do you know? You never seen me.”

“Because…beautiful people have beautiful…they’re just beautiful all over. Come here. I want to use my hands to know your beautiful, lovely face.”

“Do you find me interesting?” she asked.

He sat on a stone at the foot of a tree.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

He placed a cheek against her stomach, touched and stroked her face, then slid his hands across her body from her shoulders to her thighs. She removed his hat and rubbed his head as if he were her nameless wooden dolly come to life.

“I’m so sorry about what happened in the war,” she said, delighting in the texture of his silken hair.

The rider stood and shrugged and slouched around the tree, knowing she would follow. She slipped her arms around his neck and felt his body stiffen in her tight embrace. There was a near maternal softness to his middle, an endearing strangeness in a slender man.

She pressed her diamond face against his chest. He smelled of rum and cedar shavings and carbolic soap, but none of them intensely. When she squeezed herself between his arms she felt secure, as if her tender feelings grew an instant shell.

The rider was a man of patience, and he held her without moving. When he was certain that her feelings wouldn’t change, he sent his strong hands sliding down her sides and up again as potters do with clay.

“Why you touching me like you want something?” she asked him in her awkward country way.

They’d been kissing slowly for several minutes, and he’d placed her hand against his pants while she stroked the thing she found there till it felt as solid as an ear of corn.

“If you offered me something I would take it,” he said as they stroked each other. “But I would never ask.”

“Beg me the right way and maybe I give you.”

His hands were masters exercising their control. One was sweeping down along her side, around her back, swooping with her spine. The other one had reached beneath her skirt and was touching her so lightly that it felt as if he meant to finely sand the rims of muscle slanting from the cleavage of her bottom to her thighs.

“You are so finely made,” he whispered. “So finely fashioned. Jesus was a carpenter. He made you out of wood.”

“But look how you mouth full o’ sweet talks,” she said. “And still you won’t come out and tell me what you want.”

“You know what I want,” he told her.

“Well, touch it then. If you dumb, you dumb. Come on, dummy. Touch it. Show Mama what you want.”

He paused, overwhelmed. He was accustomed to women who were coy.

“You ’fraid?” she softly taunted. “Like how you big horse scare me, my little catty make you scared? Big man like you who fight war and thing? Who kill man and thing? A little catty ain’t supposed to frighten you.”

“Put my hand on it.”

As she led his hand into the clenching hump of fur between her legs, he used the other one to pull her buttons, starting from her neck.

When the blouse had been undone, he ran his hands along the curving, rising length of her sea-strengthened smoothness. Amazed by its perfection, he laughed.

“What sweet you?” she asked.

“I just don’t know what else to do.”

He unhooked her frayed brassiere.

She told him: “Take care. Mind the pins.”

He obeyed, and she slipped out of her skirt and hung it with her blouse and undergarments on a limb above her head.

“But we have to make haste,” she told him, then turned around and gripped the tree and hoisted up a leg.

“No, no, darling. Take your time and face me.”

When she’d placed her back against the tree, he knelt before her with his trousers tucked into his long black boots, held her by the hips, and swept his tongue across the rosy droplet barely sagging from her pubic hairs, and she sputtered like he’d thrown her overboard while she was sleeping.

“Did I frighten you?”

His head was clamped between her knees.

If Simón take his hands from me right now, Estrella thought, I going fall down in a pile. I never feel nothing like this before. It feel like he pull out all my bones. Or like my body was a shaking tooth and he just play with it till it nearly turn to pain.

If you frighten me? Yes, you frighten me, yes. Because any man who could do this to me could wreck my blasted life. Could have me thinking ’bout this and nothing else. Make me stay home instead o’ going to work in the morning. And I ain’t want nobody rule me like that. I ain’t want nobody rule me with nothing at all. And how the
rass
I come to this? How it go from talking to something like this? This ain’t what I out for—taking man in bush.

“I have to put on my clothes,” she said, reaching for the limb. The faucet of emotion was turned off. “You okay?”

“Is this some kind o’ joke?”

He staggered to his feet in disbelief.

She couldn’t find the pin for her brassiere and she grumbled as she looked, talking to herself, cursing just beneath her breath as if he weren’t there. She gave up trying to find the pin in the dark and slipped on her skirt before she stepped inside her bloomers—a habit that had started when Old Tuck had nearly caught her with a boy.

Dressed, she stuffed the bra in the pocket with her money and her knife.

“How long till we reach town?”

“Walking,” he answered, “a very, very, very long time.”

“Don’t get sulky and contrary now,” she said across her shoulder as she walked toward the horse. “Come visit me tomorrow at my place in town.”

Estrella wasn’t being dishonest. She was playing at being adult—reaching forward into what she wished to be her coming life, a life in which she’d have the means to live alone and have the privacy to entertain whenever she might please.

“Don’t play me for a fool,” the rider said.

With long strides he overtook her. His voice was soft but stiff in tone; his shoulders taut and hunched.

“I’m not trying to bamboozle, you,” she reassured him. “But time going fast.”

“We can do it very quickly,” he insisted. “Why start and stop like this? Why tomorrow? We’re here right now.”

This is what I can’t take, she thought. Now everything gone and spoil. I have to work out where I going sleep and all he want to do is fuck. If he could wait awhile I might give him a little thing. But I have to see where I laying my head tonight. It have a few place down by the waterfront that them sailors use. I wonder how much for those? It can’t be too much. And I only need it for the night. But anything you spend to get a room, she told herself, is taking money from you shoes. Now what going happen with that?

“Simón,” she asked, “how much for the English ones again?”

“I really don’t care anymore. I hope you get to where you’re going safely. I’m gone.”

“Listen, Simón,” Estrella bluffed. “Since you ride me on that horse and my feet get to relax, I could march with Mr. Hitler army from Tokyo to Japan and ain’t care. You hear me? So don’t talk to me ’bout how you going ride away and leave me. Everything have its time. And every time have its thing. And this is not the time for no more thing. You understand?”

“I have a thing,” he said, and took her by the arm. “Does it have a time as well?”

“I ain’t know,” she answered as she tried to pull away. She was separated from her basket. If she didn’t have it then she couldn’t run away.

“Simón,” she reasoned, feeling the heavy body of the horse against her back, “you was going somewhere. Wherever you was going you have to get there. You ain’t have no time for this. I tell you tomorrow. Then let it be tomorrow, nuh. Why so much of a haste?”

“If we’re going to fuck, let’s fuck,” he muttered. “Are we going to fuck?”

“I ain’t like that kind o’ language, Simón. I really ain’t like it at all. A nice man like you shouldn’t say those things, Simón. They ain’t suit a gentleman like you.”

His breath was hot against her face. The horse was firm against her back. A presence like a wall. She was about to bite the rider, then remembered that he’d talked about a gun.

If you take the knife and stab him you could get away, she thought. But what going happen after that? All his family is police. They going lock you up. You is a outcast. Ain’t nobody coming to talk for you. And even so, what you grandmother and Big Tuck could do? I born unlucky. I born fucking unlucky to
rass.
Lemme rub my thighs and see. I still a little wetty. I could turn my mind to something else.

“Come,” she said abruptly. “Since you have to fuck me, let’s fuck. But don’t take too damn long.”

She reached under her skirt and tugged away her bloomers and grumbled as he kissed her on the neck.

“But can you just pretend?”

“Simón, pretend that what?”

“That…that you like this. That you like me.”

“But after this I won’t like you no more. Because everything have to be how you want it. You don’t give me any consideration. I really have to get to town. I tell you we can do this tomorrow. But
your
tomorrow have to come and mash up my today. I wish I could say I ain’t like you, Simón. If it was so, this wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Look…I’m sorry.”

“Don’t confuse me. Just be fast.”

She stomped across the grass toward the tree.

“Maybe we should lie down in the grass,” he told her sweetly. “I want to lie on you and touch you. I don’t want to be like any beast.”

“Look, I wash my hair today and all sort o’ things on that ground, and I don’t have no more change o’ clothes. I ain’t doing this because I want to do this, Simón. Is because this is how it have to be. Push it in. Do it now so we can go.”

“Don’t be savage.”

She was resisting his control and he was worried that she was about to change her mind again—slam it like a door. And in the anonymity of the darkness, in the isolated wildness of the bush, with the feel and taste of her as distinct as a sharp voice egging him on, he accepted that he didn’t have the nerve to pry her open, even though he felt a coiled emotion that he thought might be the urge. The discordant echo of his clashing feelings rang and hummed along his bones, feeding back distortion to his moral core, amplifying everything till all he could hear inside his head was one gigantic, primal roar of shame.

“Don’t insult me, Simón, or I going stop right now.”

“Can’t you just be nice?”

“To who?”

“Stop talking. You’re making this worse.”

As she leaned against the tree, she thought, Look at what I come to. I really born unlucky. Look. I have the proof.

She didn’t fight him when he hooked one of her thighs beneath the knee, and the truth is that he didn’t hold her in a forceful way.

They proceeded with the strained cooperation of a pair of office clerks. She did what she could but nothing more, moving every now and then; and when he tried to kiss her, she would turn so that his lips would skid across her cheeks. When he dipped and tried to put her knee across his shoulder, she didn’t let her body help him with the weight, and she grumbled when he sucked his teeth and clamped her thigh against his ribs. Her resistance was unnerving, and he found himself existing in a dim suspended state of neither pleasure nor disgust, suffering through a kind of stultifying rote, wishing he could come…in and out…out and in…like sorting bags of mail.

Twenty minutes later, when he still wasn’t done, she reached into her pocket for her knife and pressed the point behind his ear.

“Simón, is either I put down my leg or you finish right now.”

“One more. Don’t kill me. Two more. Please wait.”

“Stop it, Simón. Stop it. You ain’t feeling how I dry?”

The danger of the knife against him brought the rider’s feelings to an edge, so when she shouted that she’d slit his throat, he felt the vertigo of falling and the urge to give her anything she wanted in the world.

“You want the shoes, my love?”

“Just finish.”

“Reach around the back into my wallet. It have ten or twenty pounds.”

It was a little after midnight when they rode into Seville, which was dark and unreflective like a glass of port. Under blackout orders, all lights were off, all curtains drawn, and the smoke that blew from Black Well dimmed the glitter of the moon.

The balance of the journey had been passed in silence. Their lips were sealed by shame. When they’d gotten on the horse again, he’d let her sit behind him so he wouldn’t have to face the fact that she was there.

Estrella wasn’t sure if she’d been raped. She’d been overpowered, she knew, but not with anything she knew as force; after all, she’d been the one to pull the knife.

Maybe I just worthless in truth, she told herself. I like to say I unlucky. But maybe I just worthless in truth. So you have a knife and he ain’t beat you. He ain’t put no gun to you. He ain’t put you on no ground. And then he give you money and you take it. That ain’t sound like rape when you put it like that. That sound like
whore
to me.

Maybe I ain’t really know myself in truth. Maybe them people at the cove know me better than I really know myself. Maybe them old people see things in me I ain’t really see. Them dirty parts. Them nasty parts. Them worthless parts.