FOR SOME WHILE, Ronnie wasn’t sure how long, after Lorraine had climbed out of the stone grotto, he felt the distant stirrings of restlessness. It was a long time since he’d been alone—a lifetime. Before, the person he used to be would seek out others in this mood; to fight, fuck, get high with, or just to laugh. Ronnie could laugh with almost anybody about some misery or missed opportunity.
If I had known the mothahfuckah had ten thousand dollars in that pocket, I would have cut his mothahfuckin’ throat, he once said about a man who had just paid off a loan shark and on the way walked past Ronnie on an uptown corner.
Girl, I need me some’a that coochie you sittin’ on, he remembered saying to a young black woman he had just met. Her name was Freya Levering.
You at least gonna buy me some little sandwich and a soda first? Freya replied.
Ronnie considered these memories, and many like them, feeling as if the person he had been was a close and unruly relative who’d died. The blade hand of the South Vietnamese military cop couldn’t kill him; he earned death by pouring life into the girl he’d murdered. Life was strong in the man he had been; his life was strong and he spoke the truth to everyone except maybe his mother and the cops, teachers, and marks. He would have killed anyone for ten thousand dollars. He bought Freya a pastrami sandwich and celery soda, just like she told him to.
He lived a hard truth and a strong honesty. And now, like the Silver Box’s Laz, these realities lay dormant behind a closed door. That door, he managed to think, was what his life had been. That door was closed, and that Ronnie was dead but still alive in memory.
He took a deep breath and looked up at the clouds. He could smell the blood on his clothes and so disrobed there in the very eye of existence.
* * *
LORRAINE WENT TO the used clothes store Ronnie had taken her to before. She bought him a pair of shark gray pants, a maroon square-cut shirt, and bone-colored shoes. She also got him a handsome straw hat and sunglasses.
On her way back, she was feeling the jitters in her fast legs. She wanted to run but at the same time she was enjoying making herself walk at a normal, slow pace.
“Hey, mama, you got a nice piece’a ass for a white girl,” someone said.
Lorraine stopped and turned to see who had addressed her. She was thinking that four weeks ago, such an intrusion would have frightened her.
“What?” she asked.
He was a well-built dark-skinned young man with his shirt open, showing the musculature of his chest and stomach. When he stood up from the park bench, Lorraine saw that he was tall and long limbed. She felt a sexual response like when she was with Ronnie, but he was unwilling, maybe unable, to be with her.
Ronnie’s like my brother, she thought, only closer. Too close for that.
“I said you got a fine ass,” the young man said. “I could hit on that so good, you’d leave all your white boyfriends.”
“I already left him,” she said.
“Then how ’bout givin’ me a chance?” he asked with a leer.
“You want my pussy?”
The young man’s eyes lit up and he smiled. “That’s right.”
“Right here in the park?”
“Anywhere I could get it.”
Lorraine paused for a moment, pretending to consider the brash youth’s desire.
“You know,” she said, “I just don’t give this pussy out to any wanna-be, bare-chested Romeo hanging out in the park with no job and no chances.”
She wondered if these words had passed into her from Ronnie.
“I gotta job,” the young man claimed. “Work at the Sandford Hotel in the kitchen.”
“Okay,” Lorraine said. “I’ll tell you what.”
“What’s that, baby?” The young man moved close but Lorraine held out a hand, keeping him at a two-foot distance.
“You stay right where you’re standing and I will walk six steps away. Then, when you say go, we both start running. If you catch me, you can have me wherever you want—in the middle of the path, behind some bushes, or up in one’a your girlfriends’ beds.”
Lorraine felt the nameless lothario’s smile yawning in her womb.
She took the six steps and looked at him, waiting.
The young man leapt forward, reaching for her, and yelled, “Go!” He almost caught her but Lorraine was two paces ahead—and building up speed.
They ran and ran and ran. Lorraine felt the race in her legs and her heart. She was laughing and running, always just out of reach of the young man. If he speeded up, she did too. When he slowed she turned down the heat so that he would think that she wanted to get caught.
“What’s your name?” she called back on a desolate dirt path through the trees.
“Big Dick!” he yelled hoarsely. “What’s yours?”
“Almost Big Dick’s Pussy,” she called, and then put twenty paces between them.
He roared in frustration and ran faster.
Lorraine imagined that she could feel his heart pounding after her. She thought that if she kept just out of reach, he might run until that beating heart burst. She didn’t want him to die, but the thought of him running until he was on the ground, defeated by his desire for her, made her laugh and run harder—all the while, clutching the bundle of Ronnie’s clothes to her breast.
The race became its own creature in Lorraine’s heart and mind. For a while there, she forgot about her pursuer. There was just her fleet gait and the sun and the air across her face.
When she remembered and gave a backwards glance, he was gone. She stopped but he didn’t jump out from behind some bush or come into view on the path she’d run. She surveyed the walkway and surrounding park to make sure she had won. Reveling in her victory, she thought that one day she might let some man catch her. But until then she’d outrun every suitor she met.
This was her own private fairy tale, somewhere between the Grimm brothers and Dr. Seuss.
* * *
WHEN RONNIE HAD disrobed, he noticed water beginning to trickle from the top of one of the stone faces. The boulder seemed taller than before. The water increased its flow until it became a small waterfall come there to wash away the blood.
The cascading water was bracing, but more than that it was vibrant like a living thing; whispering in a language unknown to Ronnie and laughing at his attempts to understand.
It was, Ronnie thought, like a water spirit sprung from the earth, wanting to play with the little brown mortal man home from one of his silly wars. Miss Peters had read to him about nymphs, sylphs, and elemental spirits when he stayed in from recess and lunch. He wondered if she was still at his old school; then he asked himself why he never thought to look for her before.
“You got a nice piece’a ass, Ron-Ron.” She was standing there behind him, still holding the parcel of clothes.
When he stepped out from under the playful waterfall, the cascade faltered and then stopped.
“It just came out of nowhere,” Ronnie explained.
“Uh-huh,” Lorraine said, throwing the package on the ground. “You’ll have to dry off before trying on these clothes.”
He settled into Half Lotus on a yellow rock cleaned off by the water. She squatted down in front of him, gazing at his features.
Lorraine felt good from her run. She felt even stronger in close proximity to the naked young man. Looking at him she sneered, unable to separate her power from disdain.
“This guy was chasing me through the park,” she said.
“He wanted to rob you?”
“No. He wanted to fuck.”
“Fuck?”
“You heard me.”
“Did you used to use that word?”
“Fuck?” she asked. “Sure I did. But that was when it was like I’d get in trouble for saying things or doing them. It was like walking down that yellow road when there was a whole forest that we could explore. You put a road in front of somebody and they just follow, like sheep or ants. That road could be anything. It could be cursing or not cursing, Christianity or capitalism. It could lead you like a lamb to the slaughter but you just keep on walking.”
“But all you have to do is die and then come back to life to know that that road don’t go where you goin’,” Ronnie said.
“I should hate you all the time,” Lorraine interjected. “Why don’t I?”
“Maybe it’s like a new path like those ants travel,” Ronnie speculated. “Maybe we’re like enemy pirates in the only lifeboat out on the ocean.”
Lorraine smiled and reached out to touch her friend’s face. On contact they shivered again.
“But the real question is why somebody as big and powerful as the Silver Box would need us at all,” she said.
“I can answer that,” said a new voice from the direction of the stone table.