Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  Teach went to the cooler and got her a Heineken. They touched bottles. “To getting away with it,” he said, watching his daughter’s eyes.

  She thought about the toast, then gave him the look of mischief and delight he had hoped for. She drank and her eyes darkened. “Dad, do you think it’s really all over?”

  “Sure,” he said, not entirely sure. “You want a freshwater shower?”

  “Naw, it’s only twelve hours till I go swimming again.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Teach went below to get some grouper filets for the grill and the things Dean would need to set the table in the cockpit. It was fully dark now, and he hung a Coleman lantern from the backstay.

  “Daddy,” Dean said, “Tawnya told me Tyrone’s going to a special prep school up in Massachusetts. It’s called Bede. They’ve got a football team, but it’s nothing like ours, and the school’s full of behavior problems. She said it’s one of those places where the Kennedys and the Rockefellers send their kids that get the XYY chromosome or something.”

  “She said that? That Tawnya’s some girl.”

  Dean set the table with paper plates and two more beers. She put out a container of potato salad and some apples. Teach looked at the beers, at his daughter. Dean smiled. “Come on, Dad, this is our getting-away-with-it cruise.”

  “All right, but that’s it. You’ll be swimming with a hangover in the morning.”

  “You think that school can really fix a guy like Tyrone?” She looked at him with hope in her eyes.

  Teach had no difficulty reassuring her. “Sure I do, baby. They know what they’re doing. In two years, they’ll get him into Princeton. And Princeton’s got a pretty good football team.”

  Dean was sitting now, watching him season the grouper filets. He wanted to protect her faith in the world. “Tyrone’s lucky to have an uncle willing to invest in his future like that. Incredibly lucky.”

  In the lantern light, Dean’s face was serious. “So,” she said, “you could say we saved Tyrone. You and me and Tawnya.”

  Teach nodded, took her hand, and kissed it. “Yes, baby. I think we can say that.”

  “Good. Can I tell Tawnya that?”

  “Sure, honey. Go ahead and tell her.”

  And why not? Maybe news of saving grace was in short supply for two young friends, a black girl and a white one, growing up in the last decade of the twentieth century.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Thalia lived in a duplex in Suitcase City. Blood knew she didn’t have a roommate like most of the other girls did. They lived together for protection, for family. Better to have somebody with you, even if she’s in the life. Better a ho than nobody. Blood wondered how many little ho families lived in the Suitcase. He was daddy to a lot of them himself. Thalia lived alone. Blood knew that much. He’d followed her home before.

  The day he’d learned that Battles had dropped the lawsuit, he’d followed her all night, watched her do four tricks, watched her smoke crack behind a dumpster with two other girls, watched her stagger the streets after that, singing, muttering. One of the walking dead. One of the zombitches.

  She had fallen hard since she’d been the good girl who’d taken Blood’s heart. Her letters to him at Raiford, before he stopped reading them, had told him what it was like to rise up to that world of white people. In the last letter Blood had read, she’d told him how she loved the quiet at the country club. Nobody screaming, jiving, laughing, telling loud stories. She had written, I love how it’s just so peaceful.

  Thalia’s place was like a thousand others in the Suitcase. A lime-green cinder-block rectangle that held two apartments. Paint peeling from the walls, the roof shingles blistering under the hammering sun, dead oleanders in the yard. Blood parked a half-block down and watched the street for a while. Two Harleys with rebel flags painted on their gas tanks across the street. A diesel tractor parked in the driveway of the house next door. Canvas awnings in drooping shreds from the last tropical storm. A half-dead Doberman lying in a sand hole near the curb where Blood was parked. The dog watched him, but didn’t have the energy to come over for a sniff or a snarl.

  But somebody was sniffing. A black man, wearing a purple shirt and green slacks, came out of Thalia’s front door and stopped on her walk, looking both ways like his wife might be waiting out there. Dude looking down at his tight green pants, running his hand up the zipper, tugging it the last inch, then walking to his car. A new Mustang 5.0. Thalia could still attract a client with money.

  When the guy drove off, Blood walked up to Thalia’s apartment. Before knocking, he thought about it one more time, why he was here. It was some fool’s combination of wanting her to quit the life and come back to him, and wanting to see her so fucked up he could forget about her forever. He could hear music from inside, Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing,” and see the soft light coming through the curtains. Thalia liked candles, little lamps with colored glass shades, mirrors that reflected light. She liked anything that smelled good—incense, flowers, candles that released a scent when they burned.

  Blood tried the door and it opened. He moved across the dark living room to the bedroom. She was lying on the bed in a filmy rose-colored robe and black underpants. Her small, firm breasts were bare. She was smoking a cigarette and humming to Marvin’s smooth, cool jam.

  Blood watched her. He hadn’t been this close to her in more than two years. The crazy thing was that she was still beautiful. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, and her cinnamon face was gaunt. She looked like those Somalis Blood had seen on TV, so pretty in their starvation. Their copper cheeks scooped out, and their eyes burning bright with that need. Thalia had the large, surprised eyes of a doll, but her mouth was thin for a black girl, and her pretty little chin had a small cleft. It was a strong face, a face Blood had once thought had character. Now, with her eyes closed, her mouth moving, the cigarette coming and going from lips too tired to suck much from it, she looked like a woman singing in her sleep.

  Blood looked around the room. A condom and two empty wrappers on the floor beside the bed, a hundred-dollar bill on the night table, a crack pipe and two rocks beside the money, and a pretty blue scarf thrown over the bedside lamp. The light shining through the scarf gave the room a blue wash. Scarves hung all around the place. Scarves in wild colors and patterns, all of them silk, all expensive. Blood smiled, remembering the scarves.

  Candles, twenty of them at least, burned on every surface. They stood in saucers and teacups and on pieces of colored paper, smoking, scenting, dripping in weird, tortured shapes. Quietly, Blood walked over to a candle on Thalia’s night table. The hot red wax had run onto the tabletop, pooling around a tube of red lipstick. He righted the candle.

  “You doing here, nigger?”

  Blood jumped, concealed it with a pivot, a nod of his head. For all his thinking about her, following her, planning to come here, he had no idea what to say. No idea who he was tonight. Was he the man who had kept his evil friends away from her, who had never raised a hand to her? The man who had gone to prison planning to come out and make a life with her?

  “Looking at you, woman. Watching you lie there singing to yourself.”

  Thalia threw her legs off the bed and sat up, bracing herself with both hands. She lifted a hand to her forehead, held it there, then reached for the crack pipe. In two big strides, Blood was there, twisting it from her fingers. She fought him for it. When he won, easily, she shrugged, laughed, fell back on the bed, her legs parted, the black panties wet between her legs.

  Blood looked away from her. “Goddamnit, woman, you’ve had enough of that shit for one night.”

  “Listen to him.” Her voice was a low slur. “Man sells it, promotes pussy with it, and he tells me I had enough of it.”

  “Never mind what I do.”

  Thalia looked up at him, smiled. “Long as you here,” she said, “you might as well come on down here with me. Course, you got to pay just like everybody else. Thal
ia Speaks don’t give it away no more. You got to pay.”

  Blood made himself look at her. She parted her legs a little more, threw her arms back, laced her fingers behind her head. “Come on, John,” she said, calling him by the age-old trick’s name. “What you waiting for?”

  Blood reached down and threw one wing of the long, filmy negligee over her. It didn’t cover much. That was the point of it, to tease. But he did it, then turned way. “I didn’t come here for that, Thalia.” Saying her name. Something important in that. He remembered it now, calling her just Thale. Using that name when they made love. She moved on the bed behind him.

  “Answer my question then, Blood. What you doing here?” She was talking the street to him, talking the hood. Taunting him with it, making him remember how she had learned to talk like a white woman.

  Blood made his own voice as correct as he could. “I don’t know why I came here. I just wanted to see you.”

  “Why you want to see this ol’ ho?” She was driving it in, giving him no room.

  “I told you, I don’t know.” The anger in his voice surprised him. He was about to say he’d had to come, but he couldn’t let her know that.

  He turned. She was lying on her side with her head propped on her hand. One leg thrown over the other now, hiding that beautiful, slave-making pussy from him. Blood was thankful for that.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, “I got it. I know why you here.” She pushed herself up and snatched the scarf from over the lamp on the bedside table. The room was suddenly brighter, and Blood blinked like something soft that lived under a rock. A thing with no skeleton inside it. Thalia stood up unsteadily and walked across the room and turned on the overhead light. “You came here to see what you made me into. That’s it. Well, here it is, look at it.” She threw her arms out and stood in front of him, crucified, smiling.

  “Bitch,” Blood said, “I didn’t make you anything. A white man did that. Mr. Teach. Mr. Drug Company Vice President did that.” And a howling hypocrite too, he thought. The man I smuggled with, the man who told me one night in a bar he had to disappear. “And I advise you to do the same,” Teach had said that night in Cedar Key. Teach’s eyes narrowing with the pain under the bandage in his armpit. And when Blood asked what happened out there, what happened after Teach the pilot left with the shrimper and the three Guatemalans, and Blood drove the load to Gainesville, Teach would only say, “It’s better you don’t know that.”

  Thalia looked at him fiercely, took a step toward him, another, still holding her arms out straight. She knotted her fists, the muscles of her arms rigid. “No, Teach just a weak white man. You a fucking ho master. You a fucking pimp. You made me, not him.” She coughed, staggered from the effort, the anger.

  Blood went to her, took her by the shoulders, and lowered her to the bed. There she was again on her back, her legs spread, the dark eyes of her firm little breasts watching him. She was exhausted from talking to him, telling him her truth.

  But she didn’t mean him. She meant someone like him. Some other pimp who had turned her out while Blood was still in the joint. Some pimp who had put her ass to work after she’d fallen out of that country club and smoked her first pipe of crack. Some people smoked crack once, and it owned them forever. She was one of them. It was the way Blood had been the first time she’d let him inside, the first time she’d come to him with the song of her pleasure. No nigger would have dared touch her if Blood had not been locked down.

  Standing over her again, observing her exhaustion, the pain she said was his gift to her, Blood understood it. Knew what he had to do. He let down his trousers and touched himself, surprised to find that he was already hard. The power she had. The thing that had to end here tonight. He tore open the wrapper of the condom and put it on. Then he knelt and slipped off her panties, opened her, pushed up her knees, stared into her eyes. They were smiling, they understood, they knew this had to happen. Blood put himself in, started working, long, slow strokes. Feeling it, that magic she had, that thing no other woman could do. Now he understood it—working, the sweat rising on him, the pleasure filling him—knew what he could do for her. The thing no one else could do.

  He worked her, watched her until she started to feel it too. Until he knew she was past that working-girl-faking-it thing and into her own pleasure, feeling it. Until she was his again. Only a little, only a little, but his. When she smiled that tired, take-me-on, let-me-go smile, when she raised her hand to his cheek and slowly stroked it as he drove into her, Blood reached down to the floor where his feet struggled for purchase and felt the scarf come into his hand, the one she had snatched from the lamp.

  He smiled at her, working, and threw a loop of it behind her neck. She lifted her head, helping, still stroking his cheek, those dark, bright, starving eyes telling him it was all right. Saying, Go on, go on, it’s all right. She lifted her head and Blood threw another loop around her and began to draw it tight.

  When she understood it, her hand froze on his cheek. He felt her nails dig at him for a second, the pain hot and sharp, then felt her stop it. Felt her seize his face in both hands and lock her strong, dark, starving eyes to his.

  She let him do it. As he pulled the knot tight, he watched as she shuddered and gnawed her tongue, and her eyes filled with blood that doubled their size and mapped them with broken vessels, watched until her hands fell from his cheeks and her chest was still. And Blood came. It was glory and sadness, purpose and conclusion. The hot seed shot out of him for a long time.

  Blood withdrew and looked at his hands. They were shaking, still holding the ends of the scarf, still pulling. My God, he told himself, stop it or you’ll cut her head off. Quickly, carefully, he loosened the scarf, letting the blood escape from her eyes, looking into them. They were terrible, yes, but they thanked him, even in the terror. They said she had understood, that she had known what he could do for her, what only he could do. Blood stood looking down at her, loving her, hearing that voice from down in the well where now the water was fouled forever, that voice saying, You released her. You let her go.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Blood sat in the little kitchenette, his back to the body on the bed until his head cleared, until he knew how stupid it would be to leave here without fixing things. He stood and turned to the bed, telling himself all the comforting things about how he had let her go, released her. A long, shuddering breath left his chest because now she wouldn’t be staggering the streets, a zombitch with that accusation in her eyes.

  And she moved.

  The woman moved. She thrust her legs out, and a big, sorry sigh came from her throat like some insane imitation of Blood’s own tired breath. His legs took him to the front door before his mind could stop them, tell him there was some reason for this. Something a doctor could explain.

  He crept back to the bedroom, toward those flickering candles and sweet smells. He didn’t know what to expect. Maybe she’d be lying there on the bed like before, smoking, jamming to Marvin Gaye.

  She lay where he had left her. Her eyes flamed with blood, their accusation fading, almost gone. He moved close and looked down at her. It must have been some last shock of the nerves, her body’s final protest against this shitty life. That convulsion and that sigh. Now she was settling, sinking. He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. She was warm, but not human warm. His hand flinched from her face.

  He tried to see himself walking into this room an hour ago. What had he touched? He went to the vanity and pulled the candle he had set upright from its pool of wax, blew it out, and stuck it in his pocket. He didn’t remember his hands lighting anywhere else except on the front door latch, and he would wipe that on the way out. He didn’t think they could take prints from a scarf. The condom wrappers, the crack pipe, and the money on the night table told the story. A hooker killed by one of her johns. The used condoms were gone, flushed. The guy Blood had seen leaving here was the prime candidate for a lethal injection at Raiford. His fingerprints were on the money, the
condom wrappers. Good, Blood thought, good. Then he saw the photo album.

  It stuck out from a neat row of cheap paperbacks in the small bookcase near the night table. Blood remembered how she’d liked to read romance novels, a chapter or two before she fell asleep. Blood lying beside her, asking her what it was about them she liked—a bunch of white women getting chased around by men who didn’t know what their dicks were for. Thalia always smiled, shook her head at his stupidity. “They’re sweet, that’s all. You got to have something sweet in your life.”

  Blood pulled down a scarf that was draped over a curtain rod, covered his hand with it, and slid the photo album from the bookcase.

  The album was full of pictures of Thalia—as a little girl on a sidewalk holding a skinny white dog, as a high school kid with girlfriends all trying to look like Diana Ross, as a granddaughter dressed for church with her grandmother, Old Lady Liston. Blood closed the album and put it back on the shelf.

  Keeping his hands in the scarf, he searched the apartment. It didn’t take long to find the cardboard box under the bed. A little black girl’s pathetic stash of memories. She had saved papers from her job at the country club—pay stubs, a newsletter listing her as a new employee, a letter from the manager commending her for turning in a wallet she had found in the parking lot. But it was what he found next, that was the thing. Pictures of her and Teach. Teach and Thalia in a restaurant on a dock with boats in the background. Maybe Tarpon Springs, maybe Sarasota. Blue water, white sand, and Thalia looking like a Jet model in a yellow sundress. The restaurant table piled with food, the big smiling jock, Teach, using his money and his white-man sophistication to promote the pussy of Blood’s good girl. In the pictures their eyes were drunk, the white man’s and hers. Drunk with love and Bacardi.