I could only see in shadow at first as she leaned over my chest, a raven figure in an even darker world.
Her silhouette moved like fluid, back-lit by silver. Occasionally I'd hear the rustle of cloth and chiming of metal. A spoon would ease between my lips as shades and dimension slowly filled my mind again.
She had caramel-colored freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks, and a smile that put me at rest like nothing ever had before it. I'd been burning my entire life–first with heavenly fire and then with lust, and finally with whiskey and poison.
But right then, in that first minute as I laid eyes on her, she cooled my thrashing spirit, and she did it without so much as a word.
She wore a silk kimono showing off every curve, and I saw the firm muscles of her arms and neck as she dipped the spoon again and again, feeding me. I ate more slowly, watching the shape of her lips. She was a beautiful stranger.
I scanned the room. There was a black and white television with rabbit ears in the corner, some Mexican game show flashing silently screaming faces, no sound knob. Dirty Venetian blinds were half drawn. I saw a stream of dying orange light. Her cooch costume was thrown over the back of a busted rattan chair, all sequins and chainlets and white plumes. We were in a flea-trap motel and I had bed sores.
She noticed that my eyes had focused on her. "You look awake. Can you see straight yet?"
"Yes." My vocal cords felt like they'd been scoured down to threads and knotted together. I hadn't spoken a word in over a year, and my voice sounded so much like my father's that it made me look around for him.
"Good. You're strong."
Nobody had ever said that to me before. I didn't know how she could even think it, having cleaned the snake piss off my neck. "No, I'm not."
"We'll see. Now that you're over the worst of it you'll be on your feet again soon."
I thought I recognized her from the cooch dance, but I couldn't be sure of much anymore. Had she been in the audience watching me geek all the animals? Or had I snaked under the hoof tent and seen her and the other girls teasing the marks? I hadn't had a lick of pride in years, but I suddenly felt a tinge of embarrassment. It was an odd sensation.
"You're with the carny?" I asked.
"Not anymore," she said. "Not that one. They tore down and left town seven or eight days ago."
"I'm sorry," I told her, and I was. "You must know the route. You can still catch up."
"Hell no. It was the worst one I'd ever worked. I got hired outside of Edmond six weeks ago and hated every minute of it in that show. Dyson ought to be arrested, the way he runs it."
"Dyson?"
"The owner."
He must've taken me on, but I couldn't remember. Her accent had a nice flair. It was Southern but without any drawl. East Texas, I guessed, somewhere out in the flats and deep scrub. I kept staring at her lips, and she didn't seem to mind. "Why'd you help me?"
"You needed it."
"I'm nothing to you. I'm–"
That smile again, comforting and cooling as she pressed a damp rag to my throat once more. "I know who you are," she said. "You healed me once."
6
I felt something touch my ankle and thought it was Fishboy Lenny, but when I looked down I saw that Lester had followed after me and was now winding his way around my leg.
The girl walked alongside us. She was smiling in a self-satisfied way, as if she'd just found a new partner she could help through a Tennessee Williams play. I had caught her attention and felt uncomfortable with the fact. Her pregnancy reminded me that I was really only here to get back Jonah.
"You've got the serpent wrapped up tight," she said.
It might've been a vague reference to Satan, but that sort of crap didn't do much for me. "Not exactly. More like he's got me wrapped."
"He likes you."
"Most snakes do for some reason."
"What are you looking for here?"
"My kid."
She moved easily, even though her belly was already protruding quite far. I had the urge to press my palm there, or my cheek, and rest for a while. Despite those shrewd eyes there was a trace of naïveté to her. Or perhaps that was only my penchant for seeing innocence where it didn't exist.
"You're here to find your own kid?"
"Yeah."
"That's a new one. Usually they drive up outside and dump them off without hardly even slowing down."
There was also something about her that touched me in all the wrong places. "Listen–"
"What?"
"No offense, really. But leave me alone."
"Nobody wants to be alone."
"Terrific. Then how about if you just get the hell out of my way."
She ignored that and glided beside me, the hem of her dress drifting against her knees as she unwound Lester from my leg and lifted him into her arms and held him like a baby. I didn't think anything in the world could ever unsettle me anymore, but I was starting to get that feeling.
"You carry a lot of guilt," she said.
"Doesn't everybody?"
"No. I don't."
"You sure of that?" I asked.
"Some of us set down our burdens."
"Some of us are assholes."
She let loose with a delicate giggle that floated around for a minute like cotton candy on the wind. "Isn't everybody?"
"Just about."
She quit talking for a while but kept up with my quick pace. I couldn't shake her. I wanted to run and didn't know why. Maybe it had something to do with her belly. I kept flashing on Megan, pregnant and cheerful, scribbling names on a piece of paper and asking me which ones I liked. One column for boys, the other for girls, and me pushing for the sonogram.
I wondered if Brando was still going through the motions, maybe trying a little of On the Waterfront or The Wild One by now. Tennessee Williams must've been spitting up bottle caps in his grave.
"You're from down south," she said. "Whereabouts?"
"All of it."
"Yeah, that makes sense. You've hardly any accent. And you've got a New Yorker attitude."
"Anybody who's dealt with a lot of people does."
"Maybe that's true."
"I think it is."
She kept on smiling and Lester glared in my direction, flicking his tongue at me. That titter slipped out of her unconsciously, like a nervous tic. It was getting under my skin for no reason at all. She really did remind me too much of Megan when Megan carried Jonah, so lovely in the pale morning light. They both had the same kind of childlike candor.
"I'm Lala," she said.
"Your parents named you Lala?"
"I named myself that."
"Oh."
"I should be in charge of my own identity, don't you think?"
"Sure."
"You can, you know," she told me. "It'll be fine. Go ahead."
"I can what?"
"Touch me."
It stopped me for a second. It wasn't a sexual come-on, just a friendly gesture. She'd sensed my urgency to hold that life close and she'd made the sympathetic offer. I didn't realize my needs were so transparent. My geek self was bleeding through, out of control and wailing in the dirty straw.
I gently laid the back of my hand against her belly and felt the pulsing of her warm womb.
My ancestry called to me in my veins. It's happened before. Nature expects value from us. I closed my eyes and was fine for a moment, standing there smirking and floating away, and then it got to be too much. A surge of memories brought up all my love and bile in one swift rush. I yanked my hand away as if scalded, but it was already too late and always had been. A moan began to rise in my chest and I choked it back down. The girl wore Megan's smile.
I was nothing but memories now, stuffed with them, fueled by them. Lala's eyes flitted, that serene gaze wafting across me, here and there. Her clothes smelled of hash and ten dollar cigars, but whether she'd been smoking or it was simply this place, I didn't know. Lester looked a little high.
"You haven't
come here to find out anything about life," Lala said, "so it must be about death."
I let that one go by. "Do you know where Paynes is?"
"Paynes? Jesus, is that what you're here for?" Again her grin angled up, the fanciful glint shining in her eyes. "I should've guessed. No wonder you carry a lot of guilt, if that's who you're after."
"Where is he?"
"Nobody knows that."
"I bet my father does," I said. I hadn't meant to speak it aloud. I was slipping more and more.
"Why?"
"I've got an instinct for these things. Paynes might have seen him."
"Your father? You're after your father? Why?"
"Because the old man stole my son from me and I want him back."
"Why?"
"You're a pretty annoying cooch," I told her.
"Whatever that means. I like the sound of your voice. There's power there. You take charge."
"It's a gift."
"Is it?"
I thought about that. We could go around in circles for days. No wonder I didn't like her much. "Probably not."
Lester seemed to have a lot on his mind. He wavered as he slid into Lala's arms, rising and flowing, quietly hissing. Perhaps he'd heard about me gnawing off the heads of his cousins for a pint of gin. A thing like that got around. Lala kissed him between the eyes, nodded at me as if she'd be back shortly, and turned away. I blinked and she was gone.
Fishboy Lenny waved a flipper after her. Or maybe he just wanted to say good-bye to Lester.
Jolly Nell said, "A sweet girl. Don't get this one killed."
I wandered on.
7
Nicodemus stood tall. Barely topping 5'9” in his boots, he still carried with him an imposing will. Raw-boned and wiry with especially large hands hanging off his thin wrists. One arm was always slightly akimbo, as if he were about to elbow somebody in the ribs. He spoke hard words, inflexible and severe, yet his voice was always calm, almost mild, even when damning some poor bastard on the spot.
He took to the bottle early and only gave it up whenever he found Jesus. When he lost Jesus he'd find the bottle again, and that's the way it went on for most of his life. He knew himself but never truly understood what he wanted, and his expectations were convoluted at best.
He'd drifted across Oklahoma and Texas working on oil well crews and laying pipe for the drilling rigs, preaching to the other vagrants and runaway kids that rambled into camp. He used a trenching shovel to hurl a Rotary-rig operator off a derrick during a drunken brawl and just kept on kicking it down to Mexico until he faded into the jungles. He hooked up with a missionary in South America for a time and took a couple of poisoned blow darts in the back. Two small but thickly puckered scars rose from just over his kidneys, close enough together to have been serpent fangs. Sometimes the symbol matters a lot more than the message.
He never said how he and my mother had met. For a while I assumed she was a river-bottom whore who'd begun to tire of the business. It was common in those parts. But eventually I found a few black-and-white photos he'd cached away. There were looping ballpoint scribbles on the back, and though I tried for years to decipher the words, I never did.
The photographs showed a young woman with a heart-shaped face framed by a toss of brown curls. She wore a somewhat sad smile and in every picture she was looking down or away. Fingers splayed as if warding off the camera. She had petite porcelain white hands.
I took her, whoever she was, to be my mother. I needed her that much, and I thought those hands would have appealed to Nicodemus enough for him to marry her.
My mother died giving birth to me, in the center of the storm, at the bottom of a drainage ditch. Nicodemus had quit on Jesus by then, come back to the States, and started working as a fry cook at a truck stop where the lot lizard whores took home at least half his pay. He got along well with the truckers. They engaged each other in their tales of adventure and hardship, traveling across the country, the women they laid, the jails they'd done time in. For the most part I could picture him as an agreeable and jocular man, though by the time I could talk he was neither.
Oddly enough, for someone who spent eighteen hours a day out of the house, he was home for her when she went into labor. My mother already had a small valise packed. She'd fed the cats and used a neighbor's phone to call ahead to the hospital. She'd blown out the candles and sat waiting on the couch while he buckled his pants on. Nicodemus had been ignoring the bills over the last few months and yet she'd never argued with him over any of it. Had she lacked the nerve? Had he beaten her into meek compliance? I didn't believe so. I'd thought about it for a long time. She must've known that the only way to handle my father was to leave him be–whether he was boozing or on the ground bleeding.
He'd been drunk for three days and driving her to the hospital in his pickup truck when they hit a muddy curve too fast, flipped on Highway 17 and went over a twenty-five-foot embankment. My father passed in and out of consciousness for the next several hours, driven by her screams, he said, while angels called to him and the tips of their gleaming strange wings brushed against his lips.
He said.
Nicodemus had been spattered and blinded by motor oil, transmission fluid and streaming water. The rain poured in through the smashed windshield and put out the flames creeping near the ruptured gas tank. When he came to again he realized they were upside down, my mother trapped in her seat belt, her twisted legs hanging wide open toward his face. I was already squirming from her shattered pelvis as her heart continued to feed the muscles that shoved me forward into the world.
With his left arm broken and pinned beneath the wreckage he reached over with his free hand and caught me as I slithered from her womb, already falling.
He managed to undo her bloody blouse and pressed me to my mother's dying breast, where I fed until long after her milk turned cold. I'd been nursed by a corpse.
It was the truth, but the story had plenty of tragedy, tear-jerking melodrama, miracle and morbidity to it, which worked wonders on the stage.
How they came in droves to see the child preacher who'd been born in the midst of lightning, with a torrent of rain washing across his dead mother, while his father slowly began to drown and held the babe up above the raging waters of the black ditch. And everybody especially liked the gleaming wings of angels bit.
It was my father's first gesture toward becoming myth, and that was all he really needed. By the times a passing trucker hauling cabbage stopped to help, and the rescue crews arrived, Nicodemus was back on the trail to God and so hopped up on Jesus that his broken arm didn't even bother him.
Neither did the death of my mother.
He had a son.
8
I walked around the Works for a day and a half. I sat in on a few classes. One instructed you on how to prepare cheese blintzes in blackberry sauce. Always put the "seam-side" of the crepes down on the wax paper, cooking the blackberries in a sauce pan over low heat until bubbling, then pulping them with a potato masher. Jolly Nell couldn't sit beside me because there was only one free seat, so she found a place in the back where she could take up three chairs.
She made such sounds of delight at each step of the preparation that the chef eventually focused all his attention on her, whether he saw her or not, and held up the plates to show off the ingredients before and after adding them together. Depending on the blackberries and your preferences, you might want to strain out the seeds using a sieve. Add sugar, mix water and cornstarch in a small cup and pour into the sauce. Serve on the side or put a dollop on each blintz.
Another lecture was for a martial arts street fighting class that taught forty ways to kill a man with your bare hands. I walked in during the middle of it and watched two guys hold back their fervor while speaking clearly and with authority, dropping one another to a cement floor without any mats. I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the guy next to me and jotted a few helpful notes.
Striking the nasion, which is the s
ummit of the nose, with sufficient force may result in death. Attacking the philtrum, the area between the upper lip and the bottom of the nose, may also cause mortal damage. I liked that term "mortal damage" and underlined it several times. I resisted the urge to add an exclamation point. A sharp blow to the Adam's apple can cause a man to asphyxiate. A blow to the base of the cerebellum, at the nape of the neck, can bring about death.
Catch someone in a full nelson and bend his neck forward until it breaks or the supply of spinal fluid is cut off to the brain. The Russian Omelet had you cross an enemy's legs and fold him by pinning his shoulders to the ground, upside down, and sitting on his legs until the base of his spine cracked. The Brain Buster placed a man in a headlock as you quickly grabbed his belt and yanked him into the air until he was vertical and upside down. Then you dropped him on his head, which absorbed your combined weight. Most effective on concrete or gravel.
I really wanted a crepe now, but by the time I got back to the first room the class had become a performance art piece. I might've been seeing things but it appeared that the walls had been let out a few extra feet. I couldn't figure out how it was done. Six ballerinas carried television sets with live video feed and mimed making love to the various faces that sprang across the screens. I kind of enjoyed watching the show, but I was still hungry for a blintz.
The size of the spaces in the Works was deceiving, the way they could run into one another, alternating, traveling, transforming. Construction went on overhead, workers doing some brick work. Bulky guys in hard hats moved machinery and scaffolding. Murals and posters were being put up and taken down with great frequency. Event advertisements, local sales. Who the hell cared about discounts to Six Flags Great Adventure? Who could ever get out of here and play on the rides?
Like graffiti, the process was ongoing and profitless. If one leg on the vast amount of scaffolding buckled the whole setup would drop and take out two hundred people. Kids composed haiku and smoked grass under it, elderly couples strolling along with their canes and kerchiefs.
Nell said, "I smell bacon."
My stomach trembled.
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