20

“I hid out in a cheap motel, Moke’s, on Reno Street near the C-stock track where the kids I hung out with in high school would go to rent a room for seven bucks and get loaded. I was there for a week, then drove down to Savannah to bunk with an old beau of mine named Travis Chavis, who’s turned gay now. His daddy owned the Kickin’ Chicken chain of restaurants. Travis inherited a ton of money when he turned twenty-one and bought himself a mansion in the best part of town. Lives with his boyfriend, a black man named Devondre Williams-Williams used to be a star runnin’ back at Georgia Tech until he got thrown off the team for detrimental behavior—Devondre told me he wore dresses and women’s undergarments in the locker room—and lost his scholarship. Travis paid for his plastic surgery so now Devondre looks kind of like Katharine Hepburn with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He quit takin’ steroids, though, ’cause they shrunk his private parts. Anyway, I didn’t have any available cash so Travis took me in and then gave me a bunch when I decided to leave Savannah. I don’t much like that town—they don’t let dogs or even people walk on the grass in the parks there.”

Punzy and Pace were sitting in facing armchairs in his cottage, drinking rum and Cokes. Pace wasn’t sure what he should do about her; he was still attracted to Punzy but he knew she was forty miles of bad road. His weakness disgusted him and while she talked he was working up the nerve to send her on her way.

“When I was stayin’ at Travis’s, though, I thought deep and hard about how careless and foolish I’ve been with my one and only life. Devondre helped me out there, describin’ his own self and discoverin’ he couldn’t handle goin’ through the remainder of his time on earth without bein’ the person he knew he really was. Of course I’d thought about this before, which is why I decided to become a nurse. I’m thinkin’ I should go to Africa and help rid Sudanese or Congolese kids of all the diseases they got.

“Bitsy’s and my daddy, Purvis Pasternak, was an evil man. I don’t know if Bitsy told you about him. He owned a gun store in Charlotte where all the Klansmen, if there still is a Klan, hung out. When our mother, Martita Hunter, who was from Mississippi originally, died, I was eleven. Bitsy was just out of college. Daddy began molestin’ me then, after Bitsy was gone to graduate school in Chapel Hill. She was so smart the colleges all paid to have her. Daddy told me it was what God intended, to keep the comminglin’ of the sexes, as he called it, in the family. I guess he never done nothin’ with Bitsy because Mama was still alive. When my sister’d come home for the holidays, he’d leave off foolin’ with me until she’d go back to school. I got pregnant when I was thirteen so Daddy sent me to stay in a home for unwed mothers in St. Louis, The Saviors of All the King’s Daughters it was called. When Bitsy came to see me there I told her it was our daddy who’d made me with child and she swore she’d never again go back to his house, and she never did. I had the baby, not knowin’ if it was a girl or a boy, I didn’t want to, and let The Saviors give it to an adoption agency, which they got paid for and didn’t give me nothin’ of it. I went back to Charlotte and when Daddy made a move to resume carryin’ on with me I refused and told him I’d kill him in his sleep if he laid a hand on me. He kept away after that and done his business with black prostitutes he’d bring home late at night.

“I finished high school, where I got a reputation as a bad girl. In fact, I slept with boys, men and women, too, whoever wanted me. I didn’t mind, so long as it wasn’t Daddy. He got knifed by one of his whores and lost a kidney when I was in my last year. He didn’t get no sympathy from me, and followin’ graduation I went to junior college in Tallahassee, Florida, where Bitsy was livin’; that’s where she met Del Parker. I guess I got bored there and took off with a stupid boy from New Orleans named Tosco Orchid to Mexico. He got sick in Mexico City and almost died from typhoid fever or somethin’, so soon as he was recovered enough to travel again he went back to N.O. I stayed and got tangled up with Abstemio, whom I met while I was workin’ illegally as a dance hostess in Tepito. He spent a lot of money on me and we got drunker than usual one night and I married him. You about know the rest.”

“You can’t stay here,” Pace said. “I need to be by myself and finish the book I’m writing. Company won’t cut it.”

Punzy put her drink down on a side table, stood up so that he could appreciate her nifty figure, then stepped over to Pace and leaned down so that their noses almost touched.

“Tell me true you don’t want to play Two-Cobras-in-a-Bag with me,” she said.

Pace gently pushed Punzy away, rose from his chair and opened the front door.

“Please go, Punzy,” he said. “I don’t want to be mean, I just have to figure things out and I won’t be able to if you’re here.”

Punzy dropped to her knees and began sobbing. Pace watched and listened to her heave and cry until he couldn’t stand it any more and closed the door.

She looked up at Pace, smiled weakly and said, “I’ll let my hair grow long again if you want me to.”