by Anna North
Then she imagined what would happen next. She would pant in an alley off Figueroa for a little while, congratulating herself on her escape. And then she would look around at the dumpsters, and the solvent vials, and the monkey chewing on a piece of moldy pizza, and know that she was packed into a dead end with no way of prying herself out.
“Wait,” she said.
He laid his hand on her breast. It felt like a lid.
“You don’t really want me to wait,” he said.
“Will you give me the address first? Otherwise I’ll just keep thinking about it—”
His mouth was on her ear. The sound of his breathing covered up all other sounds, like a hot wet wind whistling in her skull.
“After,” he said. “I promise. I want to help you.”
He put his hands on her hips and tried to steer her to the bed. She made a decision. She took a proud part of herself and she locked it away.
“Not there,” she said.
She moved and he held on to her, so that when she sat down on the floor he sat on top of her, his legs around her legs, his hands still on her hips, his eyes on her eyes. He looked at her like he knew her, like she was a simple machine he’d taken apart and figured out.
“Of course,” he said. “I should’ve known you’d like it this way.”
And then she let him unbutton her uniform, and slide it down to her ankles, and take off her shoes so she could pull it off over her feet, and when she was lying on the lukewarm floor in her old gray undershirt and her stained underwear, with the gauze wrapped around her bad leg, she let him kiss and lick her body like a lover, like the men in the romance flyers who made women moan and cry because they knew exactly what the women wanted without having to ask.
When he removed her underwear—again, not roughly, not businesslike, but sweetly, like she would enjoy it, like if he touched her in the right way he was sure she would enjoy it—and kissed the light brown part of her hip where the bone came up against the skin, she thought of the day her mother taught her how to swim. She was seven, and the solvent contamination wasn’t so bad yet—in many places, the water was still blue. They went to the unrestricted beach near Venice Boulevard, and usually the ocean would’ve been clotted with people, so thick it was more flesh than water, but her mother took her on a weekday, she skipped work to take her, and it was cloudy and raining a little, and the only other people were an old lady with a big belly in a black bathing suit, and three teenage girls trying to share a cigarette, and two pale naked children dancing in the shallows like ghosts. Sarah swam out into the neck-high water with one arm around Darcy, and then she told her just to hold her head under the water, because that was half the battle. But Darcy was afraid of water. Even in the shower her mother had to get in with her or she’d waste their two dollars shivering outside the stall while the hot water poured down over no one. She didn’t want to put her head down and be alone under the ocean, where long-tendriled creatures could wrap themselves around her ankles and drag her down and make her one of them. She shook her head. She was seven years old and she had a life to live on land. Her mother was wearing her diving mask, but she took it off and fastened it over Darcy’s face and pulled the straps tight, and then she told Darcy about all the things she could see under the water if she looked for them, the sea urchins, and the flatfish with both eyes on one side of their bodies, and the sand dollars, and even action figures dropped by children coming in on the boats, their plastic limbs covered in lichen, capes of algae streaming out behind them. But Darcy didn’t care, wouldn’t stick her head under the water unless her mother’s head came with it, temple to temple, like they were Siamese twins, and even when they did that she opened her eyes and saw nothing but grayish muck with splotches of black in it, and came up sniveling and asking to go home.
“Try looking up,” her mother said, and then they tried again, heads pressed, eyes pointed at the sky this time, and Darcy saw the skin of the ocean above her. The skin was thick, and where the rain fell it turned a color that was no color, an unsilver silver from some alien spectrum, and the clouds through the skin were bent and rippled and doubled, and a bird through the skin was like a crazy person’s drawing of a bird. Then her mother’s face appeared above the skin, and Darcy did not register that her mother’s head was no longer beside her, only that it was also now above, and that the skin of the water was rippling across her mother’s skin, and turning her from a person into something else, an image, like a print of a hand on a steamed-up window or a set of clothes laid out on a bed. And it was this image, this thing related to but not her mother, that Darcy thought of as Glock parted her legs with his left hand, and put the head of his penis against the outside part of her labia, and pushed until she felt it crush the lips apart, and kept pushing as a dull internal hurt spread all the way up to her belly button, like the whole inside of her was a bruise and he was carefully but insistently poking at it. And she thought of this image as his head moved back and forth above her head, and as his sweat dropped on her, and as she in spite of herself began to sweat, and as he fit his mouth over her nipple like it belonged there, and flicked it with his tongue, and began to breathe like a sick person, and then like a dying person, and then clutched her upper arms with his fingernails and shuddered and bucked with his lower body in a way she didn’t know was possible, and choked, and grimaced like a dog, and then lay along her with his skin against her skin as though they loved each other, as though touching made them both happy.
An amount of time passed that Darcy couldn’t measure. Then he touched her hair.
“That was great,” he said.
The image of Darcy smiled at him. He rolled off her and lay on the floor looking at the ceiling. She could feel contentment steaming off him. She could see him looking at her leaky ceiling and liking it. A piece of pain was lodged inside her, underneath her belly button, vibrating. Her labia felt swollen. She had scratch marks on her arms. She waited for his relaxation to become unbearable, and then she asked him for the address again.
He laughed.
“You’ve got a one-track mind.”
She didn’t answer. He crossed his arms behind his head. His penis was going flaccid at the center of the body. It was a color she had never seen before, an obscene kind of blush.
“I couldn’t find any Ruth Rosen,” he said. “There’s a Naomi, a Snow, a Bruce, and a Nathaniel.”
Darcy felt the hard floor through her hair. She felt the fear pressing down on her that this had all been for nothing.
“Could you write them down?” she asked.
Again he laughed, like he had all the time in the world, like answering her questions was a luxury to him, and he tickled her stomach and, almost without thinking, it was disturbing how nearly without thinking, she made the image of her giggle and flinch. She put her uniform back on and found him a pen and the back of a tomato-paste label. While he was writing, some of his semen ran out of her and pooled in her underwear. When he was finished he kissed her on the ear. Then he gathered his clothes up off the floor and pulled on his real-fiber underwear with an easy motion.
“You’ll be here tomorrow, right?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” Darcy said, “I might have to work late.”
“I can wait.”
He pulled his jeans up, and Darcy saw the gun distending the front pocket.
“Sometimes I have to work the night shift,” she lied.
“I’m sure you can get away,” he said.
He took hold of her chin and kissed her on the mouth. He wasn’t rough, but she felt a new insistence in the muscles of his lips, the press of his fingers. When he pulled away she saw again his youth, the pale smoothness of his skin—she saw a child with the power to take what he wanted.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he told her.
He hooked his thumb in his jeans pocket and his fingers pointed down at the gun. She wasn’t sure he was doing it on purpose, but she knew what it meant.
“I’ll
be here,” she said.
Darcy sat on an overturned cheese-food crate pushed up against a grease-stained Seaboard wall. Ansel sat on a yellowish couch cushion against the opposite wall. Sunshine was facing away from them, lighting a coal grill. The only window was made of plastic wrap; through it Darcy could see a solvent-barrel fire and a pack of ragged children roasting chunks of unidentifiable food over it. They were maybe a quarter mile past the Boat—Darcy could hear the thrumming music if she listened for it—but it had taken her an aching hour to find the shack in the gridless tangle of dwellings that huddled door-to-door and window-to-window against one another after the road ended. The market Ansel had mentioned was a handful of old women pressed together where the alley met another, selling dented cans of cheese food and expired jellyfish powder and a few desiccated macaws. The green bucket sat outside collecting rainwater that sluiced off the roof, which was half Seaboard and half garbage bags. A little orange light came from a solvent lamp in the middle of the floor. There was no bed.
“I told you she was just going to make things more complicated,” Sunshine said. “Now he’s going to come after us.”
“He’ll go to the old place,” Ansel said. “Nobody there knows we’re here. It’ll take him a long time to track us down. Anyway, none of this would have happened if you hadn’t quit.”
Sunshine turned around. She was dressed in street clothes now, a man’s white undershirt and a jumpsuit bottom cut at the waist and belted with string. Her hair radiated from her head in red-brown kinks. Without her makeup she looked older—her breasts under the thin shirt were low on her chest, but full and round with dark, pointed nipples. Her eyes were full of rage.
“I didn’t quit,” she said. “It just wasn’t going anywhere. And then you went and pimped her out to him.”
Ansel sat up straight. His monkey arm was lying on the floor next to him; his half arm stuck out of his T-shirt, its tip pink and hot-looking.
“You told me he never had sex with you. You said it wasn’t like that.”
Darcy saw that he was angry for her. His forehead creased; a flush came up beneath his skin. Under her thick pain, something in Darcy kindled.
“It wasn’t like that because I wouldn’t do it,” said Sunshine. “I didn’t want the information bad enough, and he knew it.”
She turned away and got the coals to light. That coal-smoke smell came up from them, like seaweed mixed with chalk.
“You should’ve told me,” Ansel said. “I wouldn’t have—”
“Wouldn’t have what? Wouldn’t have sent her? I know you, you’ll do whatever you have to do.”
“Auntie—” Ansel said. He crossed to the grill and began to whisper to Sunshine. She turned her face toward him—she had naked sorrow in her eyes. Then he put his hand on her shoulders and his face in her hair and whispered something more, and she broke into a rueful, private laugh.
“You always say that,” she said, “and I always listen.”
Sunshine shook her head, but Darcy saw how her face was calmed, how whatever he had said had relaxed her in spite of herself. There was a warm charge in Ansel’s eyes as he looked at Sunshine, a strong private attention and understanding. But what did they understand?
“Okay,” Darcy said, “are you going to explain any of this to me?”
Ansel looked at Darcy, then back at Sunshine. The charge dissipated. Sunshine untied a plastic bag and took out three milky sacs—jellyfish. The sight made the nausea that had been riding low in Darcy’s gut rise all the way up to her throat.
“If we’re going to let her stay with us,” Sunshine said, “you might as well trust her.”
Darcy didn’t like the way Sunshine talked about her, like she wasn’t even in the room.
Ansel sat back down on his cushion. He scratched a little at the stub of his arm, then pulled the T-shirt down as though to cover it. Sunshine smirked and shook her head.
“We’re going to get rid of Tyson,” Ansel said.
Darcy wasn’t entirely surprised. She remembered what the hookers had said about Ansel’s ambitions. Still, out loud it seemed ridiculous. Tyson was a drawing to her, a hand waving at an annual parade, a name to call everything ineluctable and unchanging about the island. She couldn’t imagine trying to get rid of him.
“Why?” she asked.
“He’s the reason the last-boaters stay poor and all the assholes in Manhattanville stay rich. Tyson just picks the people he knows will never challenge him, and then he keeps them happy with kickbacks and subsidies and cushy jobs for their kids. You heard it yourself—those values tests the woman at the casino was talking about. The only way to get rich is to kiss his ass. What does he care if Hell City or Little L.A. falls into the ocean? Those people have no power, he thinks; they can’t do anything to him. We’re going to prove him wrong.”
What Ansel said made sense—she too thought of the woman at the casino, and of Yuka’s story about Tyson’s original lie—but it didn’t excite her the way it obviously did him. His words sat heavily in her brain.
“Great,” she said, “sounds easy. What’s your plan?”
Ansel paused. Sunshine raised her eyebrows at him. The jellyfish sizzled on the grill, turning transparent, smelling like glue.
“You’re our plan,” Ansel said.
Darcy remembered the first time she’d seen the back of the Sears Tower and realized it was only Seaboard supported by struts. All she could do was stare at him.
“Sunshine’s right,” he went on. “We weren’t getting anywhere before. Then we met you, and now we have all these names. It’s a smoking gun.”
Darcy found her voice.
“How is it a smoking gun?” she asked.
“Say all those people were kidnapped. If we can prove that Tyson’s behind it, it will turn people against him. Right now everyone’s just trying to get by, nobody wants to rock the boat. But if we convince them that Tyson could steal their mothers, kidnap their children, we could get them to rise up. We could get them to revolt.”
“We don’t know Tyson’s behind it,” Darcy said. “We don’t even know for sure they were kidnapped.” She felt bereft. What little safety she’d felt before had come from being part of some machine, however rusty. But if she was the center of Ansel’s machine, it was no machine at all.
“Come on, do you think they all happened to disappear at the same time, for no reason? We live on an island, Darcy—there aren’t that many places to go. I’m betting your mom knows something Tyson doesn’t want anybody to find out. We’re on the right track, and with the names Glock gave you—”
Darcy put her head in her hands.
“Those names are shit,” she said. “For all we know, Ruth Rosen could be dead. She could be a popsicle on the mainland. Glock didn’t tell me anything.”
“But Yuka said she came here,” Ansel said. “We’ll go, we’ll ask them all. One of them must know something.”
“I don’t care about Tyson,” Darcy said. “I don’t care about any of this. I just want to find my mom.”
Ansel came and sat beside her.
“And you will,” he said. “I promise.”
His voice calmed her a little, as it had calmed Sunshine. There was something in the way he talked that felt convincing, as though he believed what he was saying so much it had to be true. Darcy thought of him growing up—not far from here probably—with the two little girls who would grow into Ring Road whores, and their brothers and all their scrawny, pocked and pitted neighbors. Why had the rest of them slotted into their last-boat places, cooking solvent or turning tricks or slamming into one another outside the Boat, while Ansel was here with Sunshine, one-armed, trying to change something Darcy had always thought as unchangeable as weather? Something within him would not let him rest, and it would not, she thought, let him fail forever.
“We’ll help each other,” he said. “We’ll both get what we want.”
Darcy looked down again. She had been used, she would be used again, but she ha
dn’t gotten anywhere on her own, and he might be the best person she could find to use her.
Sunshine slid a grilled jellyfish onto a coffee lid and handed it to Darcy. Its glistening shapeless body filled her with despair. She dropped the lid on the floor and crouched down on her cheese crate, hiding her face like a child. She heard Ansel apologize, and Sunshine shush him, and then she heard the door open and shut. She tried to blank her mind of all thoughts. She sang a song to herself:
“Have you heard the tale of Sweet Betsy from Pike
Who crossed the wide desert with her lover Ike
With two yoke of oxen and one spotted hog
A tall Shanghai rooster and an old yellow dog
The alkali desert was burning and bare
And Ike cried in fear, ‘We are lost, I declare!
My dear old Pike County, I’ll go back to you.’
Said Betsy, ‘You’ll go by yourself if you do.’ ”
It was the only part of the song she knew, and she sang it to herself over and over, until the words meant nothing, until time meant nothing, until she was nothing but a mouth that murmured the words. When she had almost erased the existence of even the mouth, the door opened again. She heard footsteps, and then a sound of cloth moving against Seaboard, and then the lamp went out, and someone was kneeling beside her. She smelled a woman’s sweat.
“Are you all right?” Sunshine asked.
“Fine.”
“You were shaking.”
Darcy turned away.
“I made you a bed. It’s just some shirts on the floor, but—”