SEE I’D MET this old dirt farmer in a bar the night before. Said he was selling his truck cheap and I could come down to La Rosa and pick it up. Said three hundred dollars and it didn’t run too bad but I’d better buy it now. So I hitched down Sunday morning, mud churches on all three dirt streets ringing their black bells. I found him wringing a chicken’s neck in the yard, did it quick and finished before he looked at me. Dark seamed face under a broad hat and the chicken head a little dangling thing hanging out his fist. I told him, said I’d come about the truck, did he still want—thinking we were both pretty drunk and he might have dreamed he had a truck, since it didn’t look like he had anything but a shanty house that leaned right into dirt. He spat and turned for me to follow him, holding the chicken now by a splayed leg that was bright orange in the rising heat. The nails on his hands were colored that same dull shine as hen’s claws.
Us walking in the dust yard past old tires and a rotten bedspring, mule tied to a pump by the chicken shed, and he stands finally by this thing that’s a red fifties Chevy with a built-on bed shelved with chicken cages. Crosses and a blackened corn husk doll hanging from the mirror, keys strung on a hair ribbon. I got in and drove around the yard fast, chickens squawking and the old cur dogs snapping at the wheels. The old man squatted where he was, plucked the hen. Feathers flew and dropped as I pulled up. I said the truck ran good and if he had the title I’d pay him now and take it.
He motioned me inside a house somehow dark even in all that light. Smell of wool shawls and vinegar. I stumble blind into a table and voices, Spanish curses, stop and start. I look up and Rita, she’s standing there not three feet away, having ripped the curtains off one window; she’s screaming in her voice that goes throaty and harsh, and the light pours in all over her. Hot yellow gravy of light, her black eyes, and the red skirt tight, blouse loose old lace ripped at the shoulder. I wanted to roll my hand in her; I could feel her wet against my legs. The old woman stands by the stove, side of her face shining, and when she turns I see she’s not crying but one eye weeps. Rita walks past me steaming from her hands, the cheap plastic curtains clutched and dragging.
I watch the old man rummage in a drawer but feel her at the end of the long room. Rita moving, bending over a small chair. Old man counts the money and I turn to watch her. The light rolling now, leaked into the dark, ripples the skin of the dark and flies fly up in loose knots; low slow buzz in corners yellowed and pulled out by the light that rolls across the surfaces of things in yellow blocks. Dust in the light, and her body moving down the long room pulls a white path like an animal leaving water. She bends from the waist; under the cloth her thighs are muscles, long curves. In the chair sits a baby whose head is too big. His legs don’t reach the floor; his skin is stretched tight and pale like the light is under it. His hair is white and fine, swirled on his man-sized head, and I know he is a child only by the way he cradles a shoe to his face. Rocks the shoe slow in short arms. Rita has her hands in his hair, her shoulders tensed and curved to him. A sound catches in her throat and comes out low, folding into the yellow room. Thick juice of light circling, curling us in. Child wheezing and rocking, rocking the shoe slow, his mouth on it. It is her shoe and Rita croons, rocking with him, pulling the shoe away.
RITA
I bought my mother those glasses so she wouldn’t have to live in the dark, spent a hundred dollars on an El Paso doctor so she could see in the light without the eye burning. And she wouldn’t wear them. Would hide them and move like a bat in the dark, the windows covered. The child in his chair with his sounds, she singing her songs low in the dark, he weaving in his chair. Me youngest of six, and at near fifty she gave birth to him, his white skin and his head hanging like a heavy bloom on the neck that couldn’t move it. His eyes rolling back to see in that head that must have been a field of snow inside. No father, she said, he is what was in me. And the eye in her too, still pouring from her slow. Bringing grain from the store on the mule, she crossed against the light and a truck knocked her down, the mule kicking her face. And so the eye weeps and hurts in the daylight. Pounding meal on the wood table she sings in the dark like she sang then, my five brothers building cars in the yard, and me they called brujita, little witch.
At dusk the townspeople came to be healed. Paid her in corn and cloth. Then the corn stacked by the door and tomatoes hung to dry and sides of bacon, their white fat thick as my waist. She in her white shawls and her almost black skin put her hands in powders ground from roots. The villagers knelt, her sound wheeling over them. Their eyes fluttered and their hands unclenched, jerking as sounds came. Muerte dios muerte muerte. They got up and bowed to the witch their children won’t touch. Castanets’ slow dull clack followed them, their feet going away in the dark yard. From the time I was a baby she gave me a sharp stick and told me to draw them in the dirt to keep their spirits from returning. She made her witching dolls from husks; when I was older she gave me paints to draw their faces. I made them: farmers’ heads and goitered women already old.
My father was gone long weeks to Las Vegas, Reno. Sometimes when he came back we moved to hotels in El Paso and bought clothes in stores. Remember, she’d say, cracked voice clacking on her teeth, you ain’t no Spanish brats—You got Gypsy blood and your daddy’s Apache cheeks. I remember her long fingers on my face. He didn’t come back. The house was her power and she wouldn’t leave. The town still creeps to her at dusk, women with shawls low over faces. The priest says it’s sacrilege, they heaping ashes by the door.
Already I was with men and she was big, her belly strained, and the labor went two days. Women from the town wouldn’t help. She cut herself to let the child’s head pass and the women, hearing she had a devil, burned candles by their beds. Later the old man came with his shriveled dolls, his silence, and no name I ever heard her say. He built a chair on rollers when the child could sit and kept lanterns lit all night to make the sounds soft.
Now the child’s sounds are muffled and low except when I dance. He knows me, holds out his hands for my shoes. My mother takes dried cactus from a wood box and grinds it, sprinkles a powder on his hair. I make the signs and the castanets warm in my fingers; we put the child’s chair in the center of the room and my feet on brushed boards start slow thud. The drum, her low voice quavering, my arms high, the clack silver clack and the child’s eyes focus, hold me fast, faster, me spinning around him. He holds up his head, and under his skin I see the pale blue veins. Faster, my feet pound floor, her voice louder, and he whines a high clean whine that holds me spinning. Ceiling twists, floor circles smaller, small. My hands over him stop. Suddenly he sleeps, he sleeps and we lie, all of us, in the hot dark house. Listen to him breathe.
The old man sells his truck, won’t take my money. He sees girls grind in city bars, knows how the money comes: my rooms, hotels, the avenue. The child’s sounds are whispers now; he sleeps too long. At the white hospital, us black against walls, they say the shunt in his head won’t drain. He won’t eat anymore, drinks from bottles, watches me; why do I come here. She hacks at the naked chicken on a board. Her face, the eye drawn; I moving away through the yard. This dust on my legs yellow as meal is burning, burning.
DUDE
She walks out through dirt yard to the road. I run, touch her arm. Her skin bare, dark walnut skin stained milky, and I stand, my hand drenched in her skin, ask her, is she going back to El Paso. In the truck the land goes by us glaring as a lidless eye, sun a high glittering ring. Seeming to whirl in itself like hornets, it throws its heat on land laid out flat to the burning. We glide horizontal on a strip of road. In the tiny room of the truck I feel heavy in the rivery heat. Between us on the cracked seat a space gets small. Her satin skirt is faded in circles I could crush to my thumb. Under her heavy hair, her damp temples, I want to feel the shape of her skull. My hands are deaf. Eyes stony with light she watches me try to see the road, her opaled eyes seeming to come out at me yet falling back in their deep oil that scalds the side of my face.
I pull over, stop the truck, get out, lean against it. Up the road a café, all night lights still on, runs a lit band of letters around its roof: hamburgers, thick shakes, onion rings fried gold. I walk up there and a woman with her hair dyed brass swabs the counter with a rag. Her wide grin red, her front tooth gold, she lets me talk and counting change she fingers my palm.
Ice cream packed hard melts slow on my hands as I’m walking back. I see Rita hitching by the side of the road. I hand her a cone, get in the truck and start the engine. She climbs in. Motor idling, sweet cold in our mouths, I pull her across the seat and press my fingers hard at the base of her neck. My breath comes out a ragged curve against her eyes.
WATCHING
He so in love with her it was something to see. Dude so caught up and dedicated like a single eye to his own loving. How she touched it off. I suppose he was about to pack it in before he saw her and thought there was still something to do. Walking up the hill, touching him with her hip and walking, she moved; her hip was delicate and blue beside his thigh.
This was El Paso, 1965. She danced in topless bars, said really she was a painter but she needed supplies. Supplies she said are always hard to get, sometimes you just have to put out and get them and go off with them. It was plain he wanted to go off with her but in the summer in El Paso it’s hard to move anywhere except down the street to the bars. I remember there was always dog puke on the sidewalks in El Paso. All those strays get the sweats around noon and bring up the garbage they ate in the back alleys of beanerys at dawn. Think about Texas and there’s those skinny fanned ribs heaving.
Dude used to go down to Bimpy’s nights and watch her dance. Bimpy was a greasy-kneed old faggot who liked him plenty and gave us free bourbon. She’d come over between songs and do a number with us, wringing with sweat so she’d wet the paper and we’d have to keep lighting it. She danced on this three-foot-square red stage, under two old ceiling fans that looked like little airplane propellers. She moved under their sleepy drone; always there was something about to break out. From our table in the corner I could smell the old roses smell of her. She was dark-haired and black-eyed though she swore she wasn’t Spanish, medium-sized but small-boned with green apple breasts; then suddenly her twisted child-bearing hips that were somehow off-center and rolled gentle to the left when she walked, rolling slow up the hill past the plate glass liquor stores. Dancing, she’d throw her dusty scent past the two old spots Bimpy had and the cowboys threw bills on the stage. Dude hated the dancing; said she was frigid as hell afterward, like loving a wind-up doll except for her mouth and the curves it took on in the dark. She wouldn’t even move with the lights on, he said.
After the show she’d stay and help Bimp sweep up and then we’d walk out the door into the oily night. Everything wide awake and the fat yam-skinned women talking Spanish to their boyfriends, walking with their stemmed words and twined fingers past the blank-eyed 5 & 10’s. We’d walk up the hill, they in front and me trailing behind. She talked in her Texas voice about nothing usually, it just being important there in the lit-up black to have her voice with its honeyed drawl and bitter edge; she walking slope slide up the hill, whisper of her nylons brushing and the Mexican boys shooting craps on the sidewalk. They ain’t but thirteen, she’d say when they looked up at her heels clicking, Old enough. My daddy made a small fortune at craps. He used to call it dealin with the demon. She’d say that and slap Dude on the ass.
She’d boil those stark black Colombian beans on a stove in their flat and it’d heat up the kitchen so we’d have to sit out the window on the roof. By this time the town was near silent and steaming slow like a wet iron. Always drink hot coffee on hot nights, she’d say, Brings the sweat to the outside and lets you sleep. Dude dozed with his head in her lap and she’d turn to me, ask me, oils are on sale and could she borrow a few bucks till next week. You know, she’d say, twisting his hair in her fingers, Them stars are just holes in the sky after all. And while I’m sleeping in that hot bed everything I ever thought of having falls into em.
Finally I’d go to bed and hear them in the hall going back and forth to the bathroom, him usually drunk by then and tripping at the door. People up and down the hall behind doors yelled at him to shut up. Her arms reaching in the yellow blouse to grab the light string, her hips moving in their funny bumbling slow walk past my door, not quite touching his legs, and the mosquitoes louder than her quiet laughter: this was 4 A.M. in El Paso.
I saw him a couple of years later in Toledo, said he was into racing junk cars, said it was some kick. Said you’re tearing around and around under the lights in these things that are all going to fly apart and pile up. Said he heard she was living down in Austin with some dyke. Said cracking up those cars was great, said he was making money and cracking them up was some kick, it was really something.
BIMP
When I opened the place in ’46 I didn’t think no one could pull nothin over on me again. I was in the war just like anyone else, ain’t no one gonna tell me I got any debt. I had enough tin food and muddy boots and hair lice to last me. One goddamn big lie is what it was, I figured that out. There ain’t no losing or winning anywhere is what I figured out, ain’t nobody gonna pitch me into no fake contest again. I sailed into San Fran with a knee like a corkscrew and the salt air made it ache like a bitch. I came back home and opened the place and I figured I was standing ground. Back then the Mexicans used to skunk around at the alley door till I told em to beat it. I can see em now, slinking off in their red shirts under that one streetlamp between the trash cans. My own grandmother was a Mex. She smelled like a rotten cantaloupe and raved in Spanish about the goddamn Church that did nothin but bury her endless brats and the man that beat her. There ain’t no losing or winning. These black-eyed thieves and yellow Mex boys think I got something they want, let em swagger in the front door so what. I could tell em if they ask—no matter what they got they got more to get and the thing don’t end. Gaining like a squirrel on a wheel, sure. When I saw them three kids I knew what the game was. Her saying what I needed was a dancer, the dude pretty as a rodeo star, and his sidekick one of them hunched-up watchers. I said Listen, I got me a dancer, and she said Try me out. The dude stood there grinding a butt into the floor in his high-heeled boots. I said Well I don’t allow no dancers in here without escorts, gets plenty rough in here ya know, this ain’t Philadelphia. She said she was from La Rosa, one of them dirt-eating border towns, and I laughed, said You didn’t get far didja. She smiled, her mouth dark pink and those flashy Spanish teeth strong as an animal’s. The cowboy finally looked at me, said, rolling the filter of his cigarette, We’ll be here at nine. The watcher stood there looking from face to face like he was judge of the whole damn game and I said Suit yourselves.
DUDE
Back then I was a carpenter like everyone. I quit school and went down to Texas, air so thick and slow it’s like swimming. That flat-out heat comes after you and drinks you up; she’d been there all her life. The steam in her; I lost what I was thinking in rooms thick, full of us; her black hair in the sheets a wound thread, thick black lines of drawings she kept hidden, her charcoaled fingertips. She worked on the avenue, turned tricks in a hotel room with a blue ceiling and one light bulb in a fringed shade. I told her she had to stop it and she said well, she’d dance but she wasn’t carrying no slop to farmers in a beanery. The difference is, she said, I say how I’m used.
By noon those days I was a walking fever, my hands cut and sore from tarring feed store roofs, and since I first saw her I come into the heat the place the heat like a bitch dog and lived with it. When I got home it was late evening and she lay almost naked on the roof. Past crooked streets the tracks ran off white, cutting their light and crossing. Sluggish trains changed cars in the hard-baked yard. Beside her on the shingled heat, I smelled her salt skin and she laughed, pulled my face to her throat. We rolled, hot shingles pressed to my back, and later the shower was cold. We drank iced whiskey in jelly glasses and she danced up the hall dripping, throwing water off her hair. In the stifled space, window at the end painted over and light through the cracked paint patterned on the floor, her back was beaded and swaying. Water backed up past the drain spilled cold past my feet onto the floor and in our rooms we wet the sheets, slept in their damp. Her hair looped in my hands dried slow: past us the trains whistled their open howls.
It was too hot to cook and we ate avocados, jalapeños, white cheese. City lights came on, blue and pink neon stood out cool and she leaning into the mirror painted her face for the bar. I forget all of it but her lacquered eyes. And she stepping off the curb in those high-heeled shoes, kids in Chevys grinning.
Sometimes she came back from Bimp’s so late the light was coming up. Been with a john: she only did it she said when the money was too good to pass up. She’d come home with a bottle of brandy, get into bed with a pack of cards and we’d play poker to win till the sun was flat on the floor. Cards buckled finally and thrown against the wall, shades drawn, we lay there see, until we could talk. Her face in the white bed, her face by the window; light behind the shade as she stood there colored her face blurred and fading like a photograph. It’s all right just come here.
BIMP
Like I said, I had another dancer. She was blond, from the East, up North I think. She had the look of someone didn’t sweat much, just burned a coal inside. Ran off finally with some slick Mex to Panama. Could tell easy she was one to leave home over and over till her feet wore down to a root that just planted where she ran out of steam. The men liked that white hair and light eyes and those rhinestone shoes she wore. She had that hard crumpled look of a dame that’s been around but don’t know why. I knew she was thirty-five but I hired her anyway. Them white blonds is scarce down here.
I put em onstage together the first night and they set up a wheel the whole place was turning on, what with the smaller one and her seventeen-year-old’s tits and them hips moving so you knew she’d been used since she was old enough to wiggle. Them border girls start with big brother in the alley, them towns full of female things dropping litters in the street. She moved with that clinched dark face, all of it a fist in her hips, and beside her the tall blond looked like a movie magazine none of em could touch. There was some kind of confusion, smelled like burning rubber. Spilt drinks and a goddamn brawl in the back at the card table. I got em offstage and turned up the lights and ordered everyone out of the place. Was just me picking up broken glass and the girls leaning by the bar and the two men dealing a hand at the corner table like nothing happened. The girls were dressed, the blond fooling with her necklace, talking low. Her blue eyes drinking that Spanish mouth she say soft, Hey Honey, how long you figure on dancing with that swayback of yours and that funny hip—damn, can you get this thing fastened—no, here—Lemme put it on and you can maybe pinch it with your teeth—She leans over the Spanish, her red lips apart like she’s still talking, beer tipped in her hand and dripping all over their stockings. And the smaller one, black hair to her waist, hands midway in the air, stands there like a stone saying over and over, I can’t fix it, I can’t fix it.
After that I had em alternate nights and a week later the blond split. The cowboy and his sidekick was in here nights with the Spanish, the two of em diddling with cards and race forms in the corner. Figure it’s been ten years ago. Gave me a few good tips and then same as now—when I hit at the track I blow it all same night, ain’t nobody gonna tell me I won nothin.
THE BLOND
Rita. She left the avenue, the hotel, smell of urine and spent sex in the halls. We traded johns and other things; me by her door in blue light, cognac in my hand and my robe open. I asked her low, A toast to the hungry jokers? mouth on my raised glass and she let me in …
She let on like we never knew each other, but them hot nights I told her stories. Like how it was when I was seventeen like her. Ginette Hatcher was my name then, in Maine all the gray years. She born and died in Maine, she dying there still I guess. I took the name the first truck driver gave me, called me Babe and I answered to it ever since. I left my husband that I only saw in the dark after the boats came in or before they went out, that man always cold and fish slime on his hands. I left soon as the baby was born, thinking the best anyone could tell the kid was that Mama took off. There something out there besides that gray wet, that heavy roll. My cousins and uncles was all lobstermen ever since I can remember. My dad too, but he died when I was so young all he is to me is a furred chest and smell of oiled rope. He died of lobster is what Mom said, and she killed hundreds of them. Scratch-clink of those claws against the boiling pot was a woman sound, a metallic scratch round as rings.
Wind and rock and weeds on the beach a gray stink, no color cold; I kept fish eyes in bottles and sold them all summer to the tourists, to the queers and dandies and the painted old things with poodles. Once an old woman with money asked me to come to her hotel and read the Bible to her. She opened it and I started in. After a while I looked up and she was staring out the window like a sleepwalker, her old hat in her lap. She said what a blessed child I was to come to womanhood here by the sea, so far from heat and corruption. I said Yes Ma’am. The fire comes from the feet, she said, from the walkers and the black hair. She didn’t see me anymore. I grabbed my sweater and ran home across the hotel beach, the big umbrellas blind and rolling on their sides. I found twenty dollars folded in my pocket and I bought me some red patent leather spike heels. I hid them in my room and only put them on at night and I was the walker walking and the dancer dancing in my fiery feet, and holes in the floor where I burned through.
Tires on the big trucks burn. You smell them in the cab, smell the motor boiling; my suitcase wedged between my knees and the truckers touching my dress. I lived everywhere and been to Mexico. I danced mostly, waited tables, worked in a library once and couldn’t feel my feet for the shiny floor. Down in Texas any man on the street would buy me supper. By the time I got to Bimp’s those nights I was already loaded. Blur, dark oiled skins past the lights, ice in glasses. Cold melts in a circle, hot whiskey, hot Texas. And Rita shows up, so smooth and so hot; eyes like black glass, sunk in, burned young. Onstage she scared me, made that cold ocean roll in my head … then the lights were on, jeers from the floor, and that little pimp pushing us stumbling into the dressing room. Where I lean against the wall and watch her shaking by the sink, cold water on her wrists, and we look at each other. They say the world ends in fire and ice; I say it’s already over. That hot pavement burns you straight through; that’s why I did it, kept moving—no slow cooking and my claws raking walls. These streets, raunchy brass, my feet on fire burns up that dead ice.
I split way south with a rich dude. Red birds and black-eyed men. Been some since then. I’m doing OK, I got it made, and the cold don’t come so much now.
RITA
I lived with Dude those months in two rooms, rickety bed on blocks and past the windows the roof steamed between shingles. Long afternoons I cut the thin tar bubbles with my nails, oils warm on the paper, and the tubes heated till their lettering came off in my hands. I drew the trains: red gashes and the tracks black rips underneath. His hands felt furred with dust. When he was roofing, tar smudged the lines and crosses in his palms, left the whorls of his fingers and their black smell on my hips. Some days we stayed in bed, kept the fans turning, buzzing; we had cold wine and coarse brown bread. At night the bars were crowded with drunks, some of them sick in the heat. Dancing, I didn’t watch them; I saw the flat brushed land outside the house in La Rosa, looking tawny-colored from the shaded rooms, but out there, walking, you felt hard hot sand and the color spreads into a wasted brown.
I think of what happened and it happens each time the same way. When I go back they are padding the cart with skins. Inside in his bed the child’s face is drawn and blue. He breathes faint strangled bleats and my mother waits, sewing pelts to wrap him. At dark she feels his throat and says there’s no breath; we leave with the cart. In the skins his face is white and his light hair long as a girl’s. The hitched mule swings its head, flares nostrils at the fresh smell and moves skittish toward the hills. The old man bends in brimmed hat, shuffles to low chant, and she walks behind, scatters fine powder on the ground. Cart rocking slow and the child’s face in my lap is sunken, lids on rolled eyes tight closed. All night we keep moving on the sloped land. Sand rolls its barren striped bars; the sky is inked and slashed in the foothills where we stop, take bundled wood from the cart, tie it with cords. She knots leather in the dark and the old man’s voice is hoarse. At dawn she piles brush and the corded wood; we lift the child, straining, jangling the bracelets on his arms. She lights dried skins wrapped on a stick, touches him, and he starts to burn. The wood catches and through the fire I think I see his face move. It moves again and I throw her back, digging, clawing at the hot wood under him. They watch me try to reach him, now he is all fire. Running around the stench I fall and their old faces over me say I only dreamed it. I smell the skins and his flesh, the incense burning under him.
Mule leading then down the ravine to where the light stretches out on land like a smooth film of egg. I stumble and touch the animal’s hide, feel ribs under stiff mousy hair. The old man walks ahead, his back a leathered board under cloth. She stays there by the smell until it is finished; quiet, she waits to take the bones.
Hours walking, sun high and the road a sudden empty strip. The old man waits for me, then turns in the glare and tells me again that I dreamed it. I see his knife and serape on his waist, know he’s not going back for her. I won’t go back to her either. Smoke in my mouth, I smell the wheeling birds and the tight white face behind the bristled fire. Old man walking away on the road with his mule and there are trucks, horns, voices, Baby wanna ride?
DUDE
I remember the rains had started, blown in off the Gulf. She’d been to La Rosa. Always when she came back she was this hunted dog, stringy and gutted and ready to gnaw its own foot. I came in and she was walking circles in the room, rubbing her hands. I saw her fingers were torn, bruised purple under the nails. The rolled drawings were torn and smoldering on the floor. I moved to stomp them out and heard her moan, turned, saw matches in her hands; she striking and tossing them in the air where they’d flare and fall smoking. I grabbed her arms and everything was breaking, chairs cracking on the floor and the light bulb splintering. I saw her hair on fire under my hand and I rolled her onto the bed. All the time she moaned long and low like I wasn’t there except that this thing was on top of her. Her eyes were calm and her burned hair broke in my hand. I pulled her down and heard my breath coming high and watered like a woman’s; she fell and lay there, her lips moving. She drooled and the spit flecked red where her teeth had cut. I stood over her and yelled for her to see me. Her eyes rolling past me pulled my hands to her clothes and the cloth ripped. I slapped her, kept slapping her and my hands were fists. I looked up and he’s watching us—always goddamn watching us—then he is talking quietly and pulling her from under me.
WATCHING
He was ramming his fists into the floor beside her head but he thought he was hitting her and asked me later had he killed her. The floor was splintered, fine wood in his hands, and she under him stared glazed at the ceiling. Her mumbled Spanish mixed in the room with the sulfur smell of something burned. When I pulled her from under him I saw her hair was burned ragged and her shirt seared in the back. I took it off and wrapped her in blankets; she was shivering. There was broken glass and her fingers were bloodied somehow. She kept talking to nothing, tossing her head from side to side, hands clinched in my hair so tight that when I lay her down I can’t move from her. Have to bend over her, my face close though she doesn’t see me; I touch her lips, the cuts scabbing and her teeth flecked with the dull dried blood. I smell her breath coming shallow and fast, say her name over and over until she hears me. Almost focusing she slides her hands slow from my hair down my face to her breasts, holding them.
Late that night, Dude sits by the window. Rain spills in; he watches the smoky trains jerk in the yard, moisture on warm soot a fine dust in the air. He blinks like he’s slapped when he hears her clutch her throat and turn in her sleep. I talk, Dude smells her on his split knuckles, and the streaked curtains move all night.
Toward morning he paced the room, circling from door to window. Hands held delicate, he looked at me. His eyes I think were gray and heavy-lashed; the lid of the right one drooped and softened that side of his face. Finally he turned and left; his pointed boots tapped a faint click on the stairs each step down.
She woke up in twisted blankets and raised her fingers to her face. We ate the bread slow, her mouth bleeding a little. I’m seeing her in summer by the stove in their room, sweat clouding her hair and her lips pursed with cheap wine; she smoothing her cotton skirt and throwing back her hair to bend over the burner with a cigarette, frowning as the blue flame jets up fast. On the street under my window she is walking early in the day, tight black skirt ripped in the slit that moves on her leg. Looking back she sees me watching and buys carnations from the blind man on the corner, walks back, tosses them up to me. She laughs and the flowers falling all around her are pale, their long stems tangling. The street is shaded in buildings and her face turned up to me is lost in black hair. She is small and she is washed in grilled shadow.
Fingers too swollen to button her shirt, she asked me would I get her something to soak them in. At the drugstore buying antiseptic and gauze I felt her standing shakily by the couch, touching her mouth with her purple fingers. Walking back fast I knew she was gone, took almost nothing. The ashed drawings were swept up and thrown probably from the window. He left for good soon after, thirty pounds of Mexican grass stashed in the truck for a connection in Detroit. I went as far north as I could get, snow that winter in Ottawa a constant slow sift that cooled and cleaned a dirt heat I kept feeling for months; having nothing of her but a sketch I’d taken from where she hid them: a picture of trains dark slashed on tracks, and behind them the sky opens up like a hole.