like a woman

Taylor took the roach and sucked in hard, held it long, and let it out slow before handing it back to Jackson. The two girls had been lying around most of the afternoon, half sleeping, half getting high, mostly just staying out of the heat. “So how come you never let me hear your story?” she asked.

“What story, baby?” Jackson asked, taking the joint and nuzzling back into her girlfriend’s shoulder. “What story you want to hear?”

“You know, the one about how we met. I read you mine but you never let me hear the one that you wrote.”

“I’ll read it to you, baby,” Jackson said. “You know you can read anything I write.” Jackson reached over and pulled out her leather journal. “You sure you ready for this?” she asked, smiling.

The white girl seems unaware of how the men are looking at her. That’s the first thing I notice about her. She does not engage the eyes of the men. Unless, of course, they are looking for drugs. A friend of Trina’s, the white girl comes down to the boulevard to deal. She feeds only the hunger for the drugs; ignores the other hungers, ignores the eyes that want her. The fact that she is not soliciting the men makes them want her even more.

I see everything, even myself—a black girl watching the white girl ignoring the men who are watching her, wanting her. I spit and gently finger my knife. There is something slightly dangerous about this skinny white girl who strides the streets in her heavy boots and possible ignorance, half looking like she owns the territory, half looking like she’s just landed from another planet. “Jackson, baby, you just leave that white girl be,” my mama warns me. “White girl like that like to get you killed.”

Taylor laughed. “Shit. That sounds just like your mom. Always riding my sorry ass about something. You know, I think she hates me worse for being white than being gay.”

Jackson smiled. “Nah, she don’t hate you. It’s just taking a while for you to grow on her, that’s all.”

“So, you was watching me all that time, too, huh?” Taylor teased, smiling at the thought of Jackson checking her out. “But, damn, then you’re watching you watching me, and watching all the motherfuckers, too. What’s up with that? Why you gotta write it like you’re way up high, looking down on everything?”

“It’s called perspective,” Jackson said. “The bigger picture. To write well, you’ve got to be aware of everything.”

“Hell,” Taylor said, looking back over the story. “I can’t hardly keep track of my own damn shit, much less everyone else’s.”

Jackson laughed. “Yeah, well, you got a lot to keep track of, I’ll give you that.”

The girls lay back together for a while in silence, enjoying the high. Taylor heard a faint scratching and knew that J. Edger was underneath the camper, digging out a cool place to lie down. She knew that meant that the dog had been let off his chain and she listened for the creaking of hinges and the clanging of the chain-link gates as Jimmy locked up the yard for the night. She figured it had to be close to six and wondered what they should do about food. Maybe she’d sell a lid to one of Jimmy’s friends and go get them all burritos. She thought about how much she loved to feel her stomach growl when she had money in her pocket.

“A plane?” Taylor asked. “Nah. Oh, you mean like those Lear jets my rich daddy used to fly us in to Paris every summer?”

Jackson ignored her foolishness. “I’ve been thinking about what we were talking about. I was in a plane once,” she said. “When my Nana brought me out here from Detroit. All that morning it had been pouring down rain. Sleet and hail hitting you upside the head so bad you wanted to punch somebody out. Umbrellas were a joke. Cars were sliding off the side of the road all the way to the airport.”

Taylor closed her eyes and settled into the story. She briefly wondered what rain and airplanes had to do with their conversation about Jackson’s writing, but she was high enough to not care. Besides, she loved the rare moments when Jackson actually told a story out loud instead of always writing in her journal, head buried, unavailable. Jackson didn’t talk much, but Taylor learned that if she got her high enough, all that could change real fast.

“So we make it to the airport and get on this big old 727,” Jackson continued, “and it takes off right in the middle of the whole damn storm, rumbling down the runway like a motherfuckin’ freight train. Then we’re up in the air, surrounded by heavy black clouds, hail slamming all up against the windows, lightning everywhere you look, the plane bouncing around all sideways, people screaming and puking in these little bags they so thoughtfully provided. Girl, I was so scared I almost peed my pants.

“So, of course, I almost lose it right then and there and want to book, but where am I gonna run to, right? And so my Nana just smiles and says, ‘Honey, we’re all a gonna die sooner or later. That’s just the way God made us. Now, if what you are asking me is are we going to die right now, on this here plane, well then, baby girl, the answer is no. Of course not. Everything is just fine, sugar. You’ll see.’

“And then sure enough, just like she and God had planned it all along, suddenly we bust up through the clouds into this bright blue sky, sun blaring down on the silver wings so you had to squint, all the clouds gone except a sea of white below us, and everything real calm and quiet, like we were floating in space. Then the stewardess straightens her little cap and walks down the aisle with this shiny metal cart that just barely fits, smiling and asking if we’d like a soda and some lunch.” Jackson shook her head. “Hot food, too. Already cooked. And we didn’t have to pay for it or anything.”

“Damn,” Taylor said, feeling really hungry now. “Like a fuckin’ restaurant in the sky. What did they feed you?”

“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “I think it was some chicken and gravy and mashed potatoes or something. But that’s not the point. Check it out. So, there we are up in the middle of the sky, floating along, me drinking as much root beer as the lady will pour, and my Nana, she takes my hand and points out the window. All I see is blue, no birds, no clouds, nothin’.

“‘Remember what?’ I have to ask, feeling like a knucklehead, but knowing it’s not the root beer or the puke bags I’m supposed to be remembering.

“And Nana just keeps pointing out the window. ‘All of this,’ she says. ‘This vast blue sky that goes on forever, even when you can’t see that it does. Remember that, baby. Most people think they the clouds, sugar, but you, you are the sky. Now you promise me you won’t never forget that.’”

Taylor raised her head and looked over at Jackson. “So, you’re the sky, huh?” she grinned, cocking an eyebrow. “You been holding out on me. Damn, girl, and I thought your mama was a trip. Your grandma, she’s a fuckin’ stoner. They must have had them some kickass reefer back then, that’s all I got to say.”

“Quit foolin’,” Jackson said. “This is serious. I think about this shit all the time, trying to figure out what she was trying to tell me. It’s like what I was trying to say about my story. Perspective. My mama says it’s all about what you identify with in this world.” She nudged Taylor. “How about you?” she asked. “You think you’re more like the clouds or the sky?”

“I think you’re fuckin’ loaded,” Taylor laughed. “That’s what I think.”

Jackson sighed. “Yeah, girl, I’m high, and yeah, I do like your new herb, okay. But I’m serious. If you had to say one, what would you say? You think you’d be the clouds or the sky?”

Taylor looked out the camper window at the thick brown smog that had hung for weeks over the L.A. basin. She wondered how far up into the sky it went, if you could get on a plane and fly right up through it, up into that bright blue sky Jackson’s Nana loved so much. She thought about David, the crippled boy next door beat to death by his mom. What was he, she wondered. Was he the sky? She thought about the nights she spent out in the mattress boxes before she hooked up with Jackson, how the cardboard would get all soggy in the rain and collapse in on her as she slept, how she hated the clammy feel of it as she peeled it off. She thought about J. Edgar, chained up all day in the hot, dusty wrecking yard. She thought about their friend Jo-Jo, murdered by some punk-ass john who beat her brains in and then set the place on fire, killing them both.

“Hell, I don’t know,” she finally said. “When I’m good and loaded, maybe I’m the fuckin’ sky. When I’m pissed, then yeah, maybe I’m kinda like the stormy rainclouds and lightning. Coming down hard that time I got strung so bad on Jo-Jo’s smack, that’s for sure what it’s like to be the smog. Rest of the time, for real, I don’t think we’re either one. I think we’re all just the little pieces of shit down here on the ground that get rained on all the time.”

Jackson moved her hand up, laying it on Taylor’s heart. “Ah, girl,” she said softly. “I feel you. Yeah. I don’t know. I just can’t stop thinking about that sky, that’s all. What my Nana was trying to tell me. Like there’s something more than all this shit we gotta deal.”

“Maybe that just makes it worse,” Taylor said, staring back out the window. “I mean, so what if there’s a fucking crystal blue sky up there, way above this smog. What the fuck good does that do us anyway if we still got to breathe this shit every day? Like in my story, when that joker clocked me in the alley that day we met, where was the fucking sky then?”

“I don’t know, girl,” Jackson sighed. “It’s more like it’s about perspective, I think. Like how my mama always says we are so much more than what was done to us.”

Taylor felt her heart catch on something, and then a small rush of anger. “Well,” she said, sitting up. “I know what I need. I’m gonna roll me up another bit of perspective right now, with a little blue sky hash thrown in. You all are just too fuckin’ deep for me, that’s all I gotta say.” She reached over for her stash and started rolling the joint, crumbling in little pieces of hash. “I mean, what about Jo-Jo?” she asked. “What’s your mama gotta say about Jo-Jo? Is Jo-Jo more than what was done to her? Yeah, she’s fuckin’ sky, all right. She’s fuckin’ dead.”

Taylor ran her tongue along the seam, twisted the ends, and then handed Jackson the joint. She held the match as Jackson took a long hit and then passed it back.

“I just saw her last week,” Jackson said. “Two days before that psycho whacked her. She was looking good, trying to get clean, said she was thinking about getting out.”

“Yeah, she got out, all right,” Taylor said. She thought about their friend with the soft voice and loud laugh, always flirting with the gay girls, always there to help anyone who was hurting. Taylor fingered the long, jagged scar running down her right bicep. “You remember that time I got cut up so bad and she sewed up my arm?”

Jackson laughed. “Yeah, she was a regular fuckin’ Dr. Kildare, carrying around that little sewing kit in her stupid ass candy apple plastic purse, stitching us all up. She taught you pretty good, too.”

“Yeah, the best home ec teacher I never had,” Taylor said. She looked at the scars on her hands, easily picking out the ones she had sewn up herself. She remembered Jo-Jo leaning over her with such tenderness and attention, holding her rough, bleeding hand in her two clean, manicured ones, always with the bright pink nail polish, tossing whiskey on the cuts like they did in the movies and showing Taylor how to make the small, tight stitches to properly close up a wound. Even when she was strung on smack and about to nod off, Jo-Jo was a perfectionist, making tiny clean sutures and finishing off the ends with a perfectly tied knot. “Remember how she’d always say how she was gonna be a nurse someday and work at a fancy hospital?” Taylor asked.

Jackson shook her head. “Yeah. Man, that’s really messed up what happened to her.”

The girls smoked the joint down, clipped it, then finished the roach and settled into a mellow, hash-tinged high. Taylor wished they had some music and thought about the portable stereos she’s seen down at Montgomery Wards. They were pretty close to the door, she had noticed. Easy enough to steal. They wouldn’t be able to play it during the day of course, when the yard was open, but at night, if they kept it real low, it might work out.

“You know what, Taylor?” Jackson said, again breaking the silence. “You know what we gotta do?”

“Damn,” Taylor said. “That mind just don’t quit, does it?” She stretched out a bit, enjoying the pull of her muscles and the feel of Jackson lying alongside her. “What, baby? What we gotta do?”

“How we gonna do that?” Taylor asked. “We don’t even really know what happened in there.”

Jackson sat up, excited. “No, think about it, girl. Who else is gonna say shit about what happened?”

“Probably nobody, because probably nobody else even gives a shit.” Taylor said.

“That’s exactly my point,” Jackson said. “People die out here all the time and nobody even knows or cares. Come on. Girl was straight and tweaked as hell but she was our girl. We owe it to her, baby. Just think about it. We may not know shit, but we know more about what happened to Jo-Jo than anyone else in this world. Maybe we weren’t in that room, but we’ve been in plenty just like it. Shit, girl. You know what it’s like to go upstairs or get into a car when your gut says, ‘Uh-uh, fool, don’t do it.’ You know what it’s like to be hurting or stupid enough to do it anyway. And we sure as hell know what it’s like to have a psycho trick flip on us. I’m serious about this, Taylor. We know what we need to know. The rest is just details.”

Jo-Jo rested at the top of the landing, eyes half closed, fingering a new run in her stockings while the boy fumbled with his keys. Six blocks and six flights of stairs behind her, she knew she’ d made a serious mistake the moment she hid her accent, said, “You lookin’ for a date, hon?” and agreed to fuck this first-time Johnny.