RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  On the ferry Delphine right away brought it up to Meg. “Congratulations on your aide spot.”

  “I don’t have it yet,” Meg demurred.

  “Chickens, hatching,” said Beth.

  Delphine and I looked at each other with the same thought. Meg had shared the news with Beth but not with Delphine.

  We were all fidgeting with Styrofoam cups of bad coffee with powder for cream. The ferry saloon was cold. I couldn’t tell what Meg and Bess knew about Delphine’s ambition, or her request to Mike. Seemed to me there were a lot of eyes avoiding each other at that table.

  “Ambitious lot, aren’t we?” Meg finally said.

  “You take Congress,” Bess said to Meg, “I’ll take the media, Delphine will take whatever she wants, and Ryan girls will run the country.”

  “Hear, hear!” said Meg, making a teasing toast with her Styrofoam cup.

  “Won’t work,” snapped Delphine, much too loud. “You’re white, I’m black.” She stood up and glared at her sisters. Then she stalked off, her low heels pounding the deck.

  I got up to follow. “Let her be,” said Bess.

  “She’s always like this,” said Meg.

  “She likes making herself a loner,” said Bess.

  I eased back into my chair. Half I was curious what else the sisters had to say, half I knew Delphine did want to be alone.

  “Do you find her difficult, Blue?” This was Meg, with a raised eyebrow and lips that wanted to smile but were held straight.

  It was an invitation. I didn’t like it.

  “I find Delphine a miracle,” I said. I held Meg’s eyes. Then I got up and headed after her.

  She was standing at the very front of the ferry, next to the ramp that lowers to let the cars off. I stood a little back and watched her. Since she stood like a bowsprit, the wind whipped her thick auburn hair hard, like a rug being shaken. Her hands held the rail knuckle-white, like she might be blown backward. Her delicate jaw line was set, and the muscles worked.

  I eased close, and her eyes were fixed down, on the maw beneath the raised unloading platform. The water charged under the boat like stallions galloping into hell. Nowhere else could you get a sense of how hard the boat was going.

  I put an arm around her. “I didn’t know,” I said softly.

  “Oh,” she said dully, like it was the farthest thing from her mind. “They don’t matter.”

  “Have they always been like that?”

  She curled a half smile at me. “They don’t matter,” she repeated. “They never mattered. Not Meg, not Bess, not Poe.”

  I pondered that, not knowing what to say to the woman I lived with and mostly loved.

  She cast her eyes back to the water. The stallions still plunged into the darkness.

  I squeezed her. “They don’t matter,” I echoed. I doubted she believed that.

  She nodded her head, and nodded it, and looked at the rushing waters.

  Suddenly she turned and buried her head in the crook of my neck. After a long while she drew back and looked into my eyes so hard it felt like dashing water into my face. “I say, ‘Fuck ’em all.’”

  Delphine

  One more time I’m going to tell a chapter from Delphine’s point of view. I base it on what she told me, what she wrote in her journal, and what others saw.

  Delphine gave a disgusted shake of her shoulders and slipped out of bed. She zombied into the dining area, picked up the bottle of cabernet, advanced to the front window, held the bottle against the street light. Dead soldier—not the smallest angle of liquid. She looked down at the dark street. Then she cranked open the tall, sideways-opening window, and leaned out. There was no one to see her in her Dead Head T-shirt and underwear, no one on the street at three A.M.

  I am a sweet rich li’l nigger girl in her silky La Perla panties. Don’t you wanna take a gander?

  She resisted throwing the dead soldier down onto the sidewalk. Like a good girl she retreated to the kitchen and klunked it into the waste basket. Then she got a hard pack of Shermans, fingernailed one out, and lit it with the Ronson lighter. She plopped onto the sofa and stretched out. Another bout of darkness in the darkness.

  Since before Thanksgiving, she had been waking up like this. She would stay up late, drink half a bottle of wine to kick her head toward sleep, lie down and doze an hour or so, and sit up wide awake. She didn’t know why. She spent the hours filling her journal. Or she spent them brooding in the darkness.

  She stubbed the Sherman out half-smoked. She smoked little except during these brooding sessions. She lay back on the couch and flung her arms and legs wide. Scrunching against the thready texture of the sofa, she pictured her own crotch, a dark shadow encased in smooth, pearly cloth. She half wished the couch threads were nails so they would hurt.

  Abruptly, she flung her feet to the floor and sat up. She levered another Sherman out of the box, lit it, sucked the tarry smoke into her lungs, and settled back. A long winter’s night, while visions of sugarplums rot in my head.

  It wasn’t that she was worried about anything in particular, she told herself. I mean, only a fool wouldn’t worry, given that life is a train wreck anyway. She worried constantly about social justice, poverty caused by racism, unemployment, lousy education for the poor, the destruction of minority cultures, the drinking and drugging caused by despair—what was not to worry about? But I don’t worry about myself.

  She fanned some copies of Cosmo on the glass-topped coffee table and stared at the covers. One model wore a tight dress, leaned into the camera, and squeezed her shoulders together to create far more cleavage than seemed possible for a size-five body. Stories were teased in short headlines:

  The Frankest Discussion of Intimacy We’ve Ever Published

  Why Sex Was More Fun When It Was Considered Wicked

  How Holding Back (a Little) Can Restore the Big Bang

  8 Color Pages of Girls in Their Clingy, Sensuous Nightgowns

  24 Questions Crucial to Your Love Life

  The New Chastity–Why More and More (Desirable) Women are Dropping Out of the Sexual Rat Race

  I’m not important enough to worry about. I do have an image to keep up: young, bright mulatto bearing the banner of success into the world of the New World. I need to look like a success. Unfortunately, I can’t spend my days in a shooting gallery.

  Delphine had never touched hard drugs—she knew that if she did, she would dive in and never come out. I long for oblivion. And would swim into it, except that it would make her useless for the forces of change. I mean, who gives a shit about me? I certainly don’t.

  At first she’d thought she was an insomniac because she was afraid to ask her father for the big favor. She’d dreamt over and over about the moment of asking. Always she was ushered by a secretary into her father’s office, not his office downtown, or his study at home or on the island, but a silly parody of an office. Her father dismissed the secretary with the words, “That will be all, Delphine.”

  Then Delphine—the real Delphine—would walk across acres of deep grass-carpet, up to her chest, toward his desk. The grass-carpet was marshy, and she had to watch out not to get mired down, to sink forever into the swamp.

  In front of the desk she clambered with difficulty up onto some rocks, stood up tall, and looked toward her father. Her eyes were at the level of the desktop, and her vision obscured by his nameplate—MICHAEL RYAN. Somehow the letters were made from statues of great presidents and founding fathers—M was Washington and Lincoln shaking hands, I was Jefferson, C was a roly-poly Ben Franklin, and so on. She commanded herself to rise taller, and she did, though not up to the level of her father’s eyes.

  She drew a deep breath and began. “Great White Father …” She spoke at length, but in the dream she never heard her own words—she only saw her face, composed in a brittle way against fear, and her father’s face, noble as a statue, smiling eternally, omnipotent and benevolent. When she finished asking to enter the hallowed halls of government w
ith her paternal aid, he smiled even more broadly, lovingly, indifferently, and enunciated these words in the voice of the Burning Bush: “The touch of the tarbrush.”

  That was all he said.

  When she knew that would be all, the marsh opened and sucked her through a wet hole. Abruptly she found herself in space, falling. Slowly turning head over heels, she fell through infinite reaches of space, and she was as an angel, a dark angel cast out of heaven, deprived forever of light, and the sight of the face of God.

  Now she had a reason to be an insomniac. “I promised it to your white, red-haired, capped-teeth, yacht-club-elegant sister.”

  I sure as hell can’t sleep.

  I am a strong person. She wouldn’t ask for help, not with this sort of thing. She wouldn’t go to Blue, and least of all to her parents. I have to handle this. And I will.

  In the last couple of weeks she’d drunk so much wine after Blue went to bed that she’d considered giving up booze. But I don’t have to. Not yet. Probably not at all. That’s not the problem.

  She thought of Blue in the bedroom, stretched out like a giant and gorgeous sea lion on the bed, clutching the pillow to his chest like a shell with delicious meat inside. He was so big and silky, he never realized, and she liked to sleep next to him, curling in a ferret space beside his long bulk. That part she had liked. Innocent Blue.

  Anger spasmed through her. She sat up. Why am I angry? She couldn’t think. Innocent? What does that mean?

  She was alert now, wired. She hated that. No sleep tonight, and feel like shit tomorrow. Her hands would fidget, her feet would fidget, her mind would fidget.

  She lit a Sherman. She went to the front window and gazed down at the street. Empty, empty. She gazed at the shadows. Empty, empty. Shadows were supposed to be places where creatures lurked, perhaps rapists, perhaps adbuctors, at the very least black cats doing the bidding of their mistresses. These shadows were empty.

  A bolt again—anger.

  She felt riven by shots of anger bolting into her body. The anger gathered in her, ran strong as an electric current, forcing action. She hurled the cigarette down on the polished wood floor and stubbed it out with her bare heel. She didn’t even notice the pain. She marched into the bedroom, not bothering to be quiet. Innocent would never notice. She got out her creamy beige dress with the short skirt, a true fuck-me dress.

  Insane to wear this at three A.M.

  O, I love the dark-side boys. Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger. I will be one of the grateful dead.

  She put on her matching Gucci belt and high heels, got her small evening bag, clicked into the bathroom, pinned her hair high on her head, her ultrasophisticated look, at least ultra for this time of night. She went to the hall closet and got the knee-length sheepskin coat Mike and Poe had given her when she went to South Dakota. The coat showed fur at the collar and cuffs, and had pewter clasps shaped like feathers. Coat and dress were an outrageous combo, but I am outrageous.

  She stored the car keys deep in the pocket of the sheepskin coat and locked the door behind her.

  She’d been thinking of this for weeks. Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson, she called him, and he didn’t get it. That was worth a chuckle. He didn’t get it.

  She clickety-clacked across the concrete floor of the underground parking lot without even a glance around. She scooted into the 240 Z, slammed the door, varoomed the engine, and gunned the car up the ramp and onto the street. Well, Dr. Johnson, you are going to get something you like, oh, ain’t you now?

  She rolled down the windows of the car and flashed through the empty city streets at sixty miles an hour. The cold felt delicious.

  She had met Samuel Johnson at a party her last year of high school. She’d gone with Pamela, a black girl from the same girl’s finishing school Delphine went to—maybe they were the school’s gesture at racial balance in the senior class. “It’s my cousin’s birthday,” Pamela said, “over in central district.” It was the mention of the central district that intrigued her. That was probably in the black slums, where Delphine had never been, except to drive through—they were a foreign country to her, an enticing foreign country.

  Samuel Johnson was a tagalong. She never did figure out exactly why he was there, a dude in his thirties at a birthday party of college kids. She also didn’t know why she was attracted to him. Later she admitted to herself that she thought maybe she would meet a fantasy black guy with a big ’fro, or dreadlocks, a guitar genius, Jimi Hendrix come back from the dead. She would have been fascinated. But Samuel Johnson was just a guy who spent his day working on cars and hoped to inherit the garage from his dad one day. Though he was big in every direction, his three hundred pounds were mostly fat. His fingernails had dirt that would never come out. He had no prospects. What he had on his mind was nothing.

  She started by sitting on the arm of the big stuffed chair where he was planted and popping Olys. “You want another beer, Dr. Johnson?” she purled out. He snorted. “Am a grease monkey, ain’t no goddam doctor. I do like a beer.” She cursed herself for thinking he had heard of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary man, and brought the mechanic a beer.

  She talked to him for a long time, though it was mainly her talking and him grimacing or giving one-syllable answers. Samuel Johnson, it turned out, was one angry man. He was getting divorced. His wife was giving his kids a new father, and she told him, “Don’t bring your sorry ass around here, no matter.” Samuel Johnson didn’t have time or space for Delphine or anybody—he was busy being pissed off.

  She found his anger exciting, and knew that was trouble. She sat on the chair arm and popped Olys with him all evening. When everyone was leaving, he said roughly, “You wanna come up to my pad?” He didn’t even offer an excuse like a nightcap. She understood, and said casually, “Why not?”

  In the years since, at odd intervals, she had gone back. It took a certain mood, it took a certain blackness. But Samuel Johnson was not a nice man, and he would honest-to-God, honest-to-the-Devil, fuck her.

  She pulled into the Starlight motel parking lot, took the ticket, and went down ramps to the bottom. She always parked here, two blocks from Samuel’s place, because her car would be left alone.

  She watched the street as she walked. Three A.M.—this was the one risky part. Then she clicked up a half dozen steps to the entrance of the apartment building. When the elevator delivered her to Samuel’s floor, she clicked smartly to his door and rapped confidently four times. The way he answered he must have been awake. The TV glowed phony color in the background. The way he looked at her made her self-conscious about her legs descending from the cream-colored skirt that barely hung below her bottom. “You look good,” he said. “Damn good.” He put a big paw around her waist and drew her to him.

  “I don’t want nobody here when I ain’t here,” Samuel Johnson growled. Delphine reflected that was the longest sentence he’d spoken in her hours there. He stood in the bathroom with the door open, pissing. So she slipped out of bed, flung on her fuck-me outfit, and scurried out of his apartment ahead of him. She clutched her evening bag in one hand and car keys in the other, rode the elevator alone, and emerged into the bright daylight of New Year’s Eve day, 1978. The miniskirt made her feel self-conscious before eight o’clock in the morning, among people who were going to work.

  She walked two blocks back to the motel and paid. She redid her makeup in the rear view mirror. I look impeccable. Studying her face, she felt grateful to Samuel. In his unpleasant way he was perfect, and he had never known that.

  She gave a twisted smile at the mirror. I’m impeccable. Unmarked. Perfect.

  Beyond the little go-up-and-down gate she left rubber and slid left onto the one-way street. It felt damn good.

  Blue, I’m sorry to worry you. He would have been awake an hour or two by now, alone in the house, wondering. Soon you will understand.

  She knew now. It’s good to know. She pushed the accelerator with her knowledge. She felt a weird exhilaration.

  On t
he way to the ferry she stopped at a drug store and bought a legal pad. While she waited in the car in line for the Bremerton Ferry, she wrote a note to Blue. She wished she had some of her own stationery, but there was no way. She folded the yellow sheet in half, wrote Blue’s name on the blank side, and put it on the passenger seat, carefully squared to the sewn lines in the fabric.

  She looked at the next blank page on the pad. After a few minutes she was able to write, “Daddy and Poe.” But she couldn’t go on.

  In a few minutes the lines of cars advanced on to the ferry. Delphine ended up toward the front, which pleased her.

  She stayed in the car until the ferry had been underway for ten or fifteen minutes. She kept looking at that blank sheet. She couldn’t think of any words she wanted to put on the page.

  After a long while she signed her name to the blankness, folded the sheet, addressed it, and tucked it under the sheet for Blue. Then, briskly, she stepped out of the car, wrapped herself tight in the sheepskin coat, and walked to the front of the ferry.

  Once there she set out on one deliberate circle of the boat, counter-clockwise. She didn’t look at any of the people, not the ones at the rail looking out at the seascape or back at the cityscape, not the ones inside drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups and reading the newspaper. She didn’t cast a glance at the city behind or the town ahead, at the sky above or the ocean beneath her feet.

  The gulls were scattered behind the boat, like torn bits of paper in a whirling wind. She stared at them, white in the bright morning sunlight. Then, deliberately, she blinked her eyes hard, twice.

  Yes!

  The gulls turned black, black as ravens. Thank you, Blue.

  Resolutely, she completed her circle. She held the coat tight around her—I don’t want to be cold. As she walked, like an efficient executive, she thought once more through the details, so the job would be done right. Fortunately, she knew the engineering of the bottom of a ferry. She knew that the propellers blasted objects away from the stern, so it made no sense to go in there. She knew that the bow made a compression wave, but she also knew how to avoid it. She knew how the water coming under the bow made its vicious venturi, how the V shape of the hull funneled sea water straight into the propellers, to give them more bite. She knew exactly what would happen to a stick dropped into that venturi, or a sheepskin coat, or a human being. Simple, so elegantly simple.