The Heart is Deceitful above All Things (12 page)

‘I saw a pretty yellow dress, too,' I say.

‘Anything you want. I love you, sweet-pie.'

I nod and press my nail in so hard into the crack in the phone cord that I can feel the wires.

‘Bye'––he coughs–– ‘love to your sister . . . my two pretty girls.'

I nod. I wonder if I can get electrocuted if I go too deep in.

‘You there? . . . I'm hangin' up now . . . Hello? Good-bye . . . bye-bye . . .'

The phone clicks. I push my nail in as far as it can go. Nothing happens. I hang up the phone and stomp on ants.
One morning from our room I hear Sarah screaming into the pay phone. Schneider Truck must have caught her on the way home from the club. ‘Fuck off, pervert fucker!' she screams. ‘No, you ain't comin' back, unless you want your shriveled-up balls as a butt plug.'

I turn the Bugs Bunny cartoon louder, but I can still hear the phone slam down again and again. The dresses weren't really that nice anyway.

I don't leave our room much. We go to a diner for Cheerios, and there's a Hostess outlet nearby, where I walk every two days to buy us Ding-Dongs.

The police are after me again because the evil is in me again. Sarah said a cop came to the strip club and flashed a picture of me. I didn't believe her at first, but a week later sirens and blue lights surrounded the club.

I hide under the bed. The police bang on the doors, straight down the line of rooms. I hear keys jingle outside the door, then in the lock. I flatten myself to the dusty, moldy rug. ‘See, prostitutes no here, amigo,' the Cuban manager says. Flashlights sweep across the floor. I can see their thick black shoes walking toward me. ‘No here! No here!' he says. The shoes walk to the bed, I hold my breath. They pause and then move past into the bathroom. I see the flashlight shine into it. ‘No here, see?'

Sarah doesn't come back for three days. ‘I was fuckin' arrested!' she yells. She pulls off her heels and throws
them at me. I don't step out of the way this time. ‘Thank fucking God the club got us out . . . or I'd've turned you in!' Her face is yellowish, and her hands shake.

I had pretty much stayed under the bed while she was gone. I came out to grab the Ding-Dongs and to sneak into the bathroom, but sometimes I was too scared to make it. I prayed to Jesus to heal me, to save me, to restore me. I recited every psalm, every proverb, every chapter and verse I knew, hundreds of times, till it filled my dreams when I slept.

‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' I whisper to Sarah. ‘I've . . . I've tried to cast Satan from my soul . . .'

‘Well . . . you're gonna have to fuckin' try harder!' Her eyes are rimmed raw like chopped meat. She sits on the bed, her head between her legs. Her body raises up with a sob.

‘I prayed for Jesus to bring you back. I prayed and prayed . . .'

‘Shut the fuck up.'

‘The . . . the . . . police might not want me anymore, though, He might have cured me. He brought you home . . . “In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength”.'

She reaches fast over to the night table and grabs a heavy motel glass. It hits me on the collarbone with a thud. I hear the crack. ‘You're lucky . . . I was aimin' for your ugly-ass fuckin' face!' Pain races like an ice shear through me, but I don't move. I blink the tears away. ‘Don't stare at me like that, you evil fuckin' piece of
shit. What? You think you're better'n me? If it weren't for me, you'd be burnin' in hell right now!' She reaches for the glass where it bounced off me and rolled near her feet.

‘I p-prayed very hard,' I whisper.

‘You forgot how to shut the fuck up!' I watch in slow motion as she winds her arm back and hurls the glass again. My eyes close against the coming impact across my face. It hits me in my stomach. I lean over from the force of it and gasp. ‘You've gotta learn when to shut the fuck up!' I lean down and try to catch my breath.

She didn't hit my face. I smile up at her. She didn't even aim for it. I wrap my arms around my stomach and rock myself gently, feeling soothed and comforted.

‘Get the fuck out,' she says, her voice throaty and raw. ‘You're a fuckin' demon.' The smile stays frozen on my face, and I hold on to my stomach and keep rocking. She staggers over to me. She grabs a handful of my hair and pulls me backward. Without thinking I put my hand up and over her hand so I won't be carried only by my hair. My collarbone throbs as I lift my arm. ‘You possessed piece of shit.' I try to walk my legs backward, but I can't stand. The room is blurry. I hear her opening the door. ‘I never should have come for you.' The skin on her hand is soft like polished leather.

‘Let go of me, let go, you evil fuck!' She's shaking her hand in my hair. I feel a thud on my side, then another. It's her foot. I let go of her hand and fall backward, half out of the door. ‘Go to hell,' she says in a low, hushed
voice, and kicks again so I'm out the door. ‘If the police find ya, they're gonna burn you up. First they'll chop you up.' She spits down at me. It hits my mouth. ‘Then you burn . . . in hell. So if I was you . . . I'd stay away from cops!' She looks nervously both ways down the row of room doors. ‘If I so much as see you, I'll call them myself.' Then she closes the door softly, as if she were shutting it on a friendly salesman.

I sit there staring at the footprints and dents on the bottom half of the door. Someone once kicked hard to try to get back in. I lick the spit off my lips with my tongue and listen to the flux of pain like rotating arcade lights, the throb moving from my scalp to my collarbone to wherever. I get on my hands and knees and pull myself up. I blink away the blurriness. The lights are off at the club. There's only the hum of moths batting against the caged-in light bulb in the middle of the row, crickets, and the low rumble of an isolated truck driving down Orange Blossom Trail.

I walk around the motel to the clump of bushes and trees. I've often seen men fast asleep back here, smelling of alcohol and urine, their cars the only ones left in the lot at the club. I crawl into a flattened patch and curl up. She didn't aim for my face, I repeat to myself, and I taste her saliva in my mouth.

The next day I stay hidden behind the motel. I drink from a leaky spigot. I cover myself with fallen palm leaves and sleep. When I hear a police siren race by, I wet myself.

At night I listen to the different women chatting, going
off to the club or coming back. Finally I hear her. ‘I better get my pay, that's all,' Sarah says.

‘They might raid again,' another woman says.

‘That's what happens when cops get stiffed on their fuckin' bribes,' she says.

‘Just keep your shit away from the club, is all I heard, or your ass gets fired on the spot . . .'

‘I better get my pay, that's all,' she says again, and I hear the loud click of her red heels along the concrete walk. I walk around the back to the manager's office. He's a small, brawny Cuban with a single thin eyebrow across his forehead. He recently put new bedspreads in the rooms, bright Day-Glo with hallucinogenic geometric shapes on them. Whenever he sees any of the women with lit cigarettes, he screams. If he sees Sarah walking from the club back to the room, a cigarette dangling from her red, shimmering lips, he runs out of his stale, fart-smelling office where he sits all day blasting soccer games in Spanish, ringing the service bell on his counter when his team scores.

Usually she grins and tosses the cigarette, crushing it under her high heels, her leg stepped forward and twisted from her fluid hips. Her eyes hold his gaze, causing the dark stain under his armpits to spread. Other times when she's had too many Mickey Mouse money tips and not enough medicine, she flicks the cigarette at his feet, making it spray like an electric spark while he yells at her.

I knock on the screen door that he always keeps locked on the inside. ‘
Qué?
' He doesn't look up from the soccer game.

‘I'm locked out.' I mumble.

‘Qué? Qué?'

I look past the tiny mesh stitches of the screen door and glimpse chubby little legs sticking out from behind a wall. Their kid, that Sarah told me about. ‘He's retarded or something, and they treat him like a dog, feed him from dog bowls,' she said. ‘Heard they tie him up sometimes, too. See, you don't even got it so bad.'

The manager hits wildly at the bell.
‘Goal, goal!'
he yells. When I look back the fat baby legs are gone.

I start to knock again, but he moves from around the counter.

‘I hear you once, you think I don't hear you, I hear you.' He opens the door and walks past me, jingling the keys. The sound gives me a chill. He stops at our door and opens it.

‘Gracias,'
I whisper.

‘You look not so good,' he says, and turns and walks away. I close the door, turn on the light. I pull the chair over to the cabinet above the sink. I climb up stiffly and take down the bottle of Wild Turkey. ‘Chicken,' I whisper. I grab the glass still on the floor and fill it halfway. I run the tap, wait till the rust clears as much as it will, and hold the bottle under it, then my glass. I put the bottle back.

I swallow down the drink as fast as I can while walking into the bathroom. I slowly take off my clothes. The ache in my shoulder is starting to fade fast. I climb into the tub and turn the water on as hot as I can stand. I wish I had a scrub brush.

W
HEN
J
ESUS DIED
angels cried and their tears turned to stones. My mom's new boyfriend is born again, so we scour the dirt like gold panners for the fingernailsize rocks with crosses naturally formed on them. Angel tears. We try to escape from the busload of Baptists giving praises and hallelujahs, which echo loudly all through the forest of Fairy Stone Park, Virginia.

I always find the best ones, with clearly defined crosses rising out of the brown stones, not the broken crumbly ones my mom finds.

‘You find 'em like an old horse finds glue, don't ya?' Her eyes squeeze up jealously, her nostrils widening.

‘Lord smiling on you today, son.' I look up into his big face, long and black bearded exactly like Paul Bunyon, smiling down at me, with the emerald treetops shifting the light above his head in glints and glimmers.

He reaches down and takes the cross stone from my outstretched palm. ‘Have to show this one at services.' He nods. ‘Let the Lord guide you to more, son.' He pats my ass as I turn away. I catch my mom's jagged glare and
my smile folds. We continue to hunt, bent over the dark peaty moist earth in silence.

‘Look at this one, Jackson!' My mom rushes over to him. She holds out her hand like I did, her other hand pushing her yellow hair back against her skull repeatedly. He leans over her palm, she shifts back and forth, he turns it over and shakes his head.

‘Not as good as his, baby doll.' He nods toward me. I look away, grinning. I hear her throw it into the bushes.

‘I found another one!' I yell, and raise up my arm, holding another perfectly formed tear of an angel.

‘You're my baby.'

I raise my head silently from my pillow; there's only a thin divider that doesn't reach up to the trailer roof.

‘My sweet little girl,' he half whispers, and I hear blankets moving and sticky skin noises.

‘Yes, I am.' Her voice sounds too high and babyish.

‘What are you, darlin'?'

‘Daddy's little girl,' she answers right away.

‘Daddy needs his little girl.' I hear the patting of flesh, and I lay my head back down. She makes purring noises.

‘Tell me you're Daddy's good girl,' he growls. She says it. I reach under my blanket.

‘Ya want Daddy to fuck ya?'

She says yes, says ‘Daddy' twice. I reach between my legs.

‘C'mon, baby girl, c'mon, give it to your daddy.' His voice rises. ‘C'mon. Good girl, good girl.'

I take my thing and push it backward between my legs, and I feel the trailer swaying. I rub the smooth skin where my thing was, in time to the rocking.

‘Good girl, good girl, Daddy loves you.' I close my eyes.

I watch her from the side in the morning, leaning into the tiny mirror over the kitchen sink, smoothing tan foundation over her face with a small triangular white sponge. She dabs it on heavily over her nose and cheeks, covering the spray of freckles that she hates. The same ones on my face that I hate.

‘Make mine disappear?' I ask her suddenly. She turns to me in surprise that I'm even there. I step back. She smiles.

‘Pull over a chair.' I drag over one of the red metal folding chairs.

‘Climb up.' I stand on top and see our faces in the mirror.

‘Let's get rid of those.' I nod my head and watch her dab the sponge into some beige liquid foundation that's open with the rest of her makeup above the sink ledge.

‘Here.' She rubs it over my nose and cheeks, not gently like she did to herself; but my freckles are darker. I enjoy her touching me.

‘There! Look.' I stand on my tiptoes and lean into the mirror. They're gone. I smile up at her.

‘We gotta do something about your nose,' she says. I look at hers, delicate, upturned, and thin.

‘Somebody fucked their nigger slave, and you got the nose to prove it.' I look at mine, short, turned up like hers, but with thick nostrils, wider and almost flattened.

‘Nigger––nigger nose!' She laughs.

‘Fix it? Please?' I don't want to cry.

‘Sure, nigger nose!' She laughs again, and I smile, my lip shaking.

‘Camouflage it . . . see, I learned that in beauty school.' I watch her take a small brush and dip it in brownish eye shadow.

‘One day I'll go back, I'll get a shop for the models in Hollywood . . .' She sucks the wooden end of the brush. ‘Or I'll be a model.'

‘Take me?'