The other boys nodded. “Damn right,” one said.
“Violence is the only language they understand,” said Derrick. “So if you don’t know it, you better learn it.”
Nick nodded again. He resisted the impulse to check his watch. It seemed like Trixie and the other girls should have been here by now. He figured when the girls got back they would set aside business and just sit around and get drunk, which is what he really wanted.
“You got what it takes to earn the broken cross, Nick? Put the S.S. on your skin? You know, you got to earn it.”
“I know,” said Nick.
“Can you handle yourself in a fight?” The others looked him over like they couldn’t really believe it. “’Cause I mean, no offense dude, but you’re kind of a scrawny little fuck.”
Somebody laughed.
“I can handle myself,” Nick said.
“You hear that Matt? He think’s he’s hard.”
“He don’t look too hard,” Matt said.
“Well. I guess we gotta ask Trix about that.”
Nick flushed. Derrick leaned toward him and said, “Our girl, she knows all about hard. You think you can fill her up, little boy? She let you in there yet? She ain’t a little kid. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you ain’t gonna fool her.” He grabbed his crotch, spreading his fingers to indicate he had quite a handful. “Besides, I stretched her out pretty good. I don’t know if she’ll be able to feel your little needle.”
“Fuck you,” Nick said.
“Uh-oh, here we go,” said Matt. Nick glared at the floor and stood up. Derrick rose to meet him, but Nick turned toward the door.”
“What?” said Derrick? “Are you going to cry? Oh my God, you are.”
Nick strode toward the door. A stinging heat pressed behind his eyes.
Derrick laughed. “You sure you want to go? We got four of us, only three girls. I think Matt could use a bitch, couldn’t you, Matt?”
“Fuck you dude,” Matt said.
Nick opened the door and stepped outside; the evening air felt cool after the dense heat of the bar. He felt an absurd impulse to ask them to tell Trixie that he’d gone home, but crushed it. One of the boys said, “What a little bitch,” and then the door shut behind him. He started the long walk to the ferry, which would carry him across the river and back into familiar territory. Streetlamps along the way shed cold trees of light. The dark sky was close and heavy.
After that, he was sure she was done with him. But this morning’s phone call at the restaurant gave him new hope, and he found himself waiting for her on his front porch. He watched the evening settle over New Orleans like some great hunched buzzard, the sky deepening into the star-spiked blue of twilight. Fitful gusts of wind carried a cold undercurrent and occasionally pelted him with a few fat, isolated raindrops. Across the street, the thrashing fronds of a palm tree tossed around a bright shard of moon.
Nick and his mother lived in a shotgun house a few blocks lakeside of St. Charles Avenue, and like many other houses on their street it existed on the cusp of total dereliction. Paint peeled from its walls, and the wood was so riddled with termites that, during mating season, huge swarms of them would choke the air inside the house. Their tiny lawn seemed eager to make up for its size with outright belligerence, as though it harbored aspirations to junglehood and resented its confined circumstances. As porch lights and windows began to glow along the street, his own home grew darker by comparison, until it looked like an abandoned house, and would have likely attracted the usual doomed human ecology of abandoned houses were it not for the occasional errant stabs of light glimpsed through windows, and the mournful sounds which from time to time seemed to exhale from the building itself and spoil the air around it.
A small band of black kids made their way down the street, one of them swinging a long stick in a sweeping arc, like an explorer hacking his way through heavy foliage. They talked easily, loudly, apparently indifferent to anything in the world other than themselves and their own immediate impulses. Nick watched them come with a puzzling lack of emotion: they were just kids tonight, kids he didn’t know. He tried to summon the anger he believed was justified and proper, and failed. The one with the stick whacked it against the fenders of parked cars, sending little detonations ricocheting down the street. Normally this would throw Nick into a fury, which he would nurture from the near-obscurity of his front porch; but tonight each crack of the stick vanished into a gulf inside him. As they passed in front of his house, they fell abruptly silent. They did not look at him or his house, and they held their heads back and sauntered with their customary loose-limbed bravado, but he knew the place spooked them. Sometimes that embarrassed him, other times it made him proud. Tonight he just felt defeated.
Finally they disappeared around the corner. Their voices picked up again, and soon he heard the steady, diminishing whack of the stick against metal. He waited several more minutes; the wind increased, and heavy clouds moved in to obscure the moon. Nick watched as two headlights glided around a distant corner and made their steady way to him. Trixie had finally arrived.
Before he opened the door for her, he said, “It’s dark inside. They ain’t cut the power back on yet.”
“That’s okay.”
He led her inside. By now he had become accustomed to the darkness, but he remembered his first time coming home to it, and knew how Trixie must feel. It had been so overwhelming that he had actually experienced a rush of vertigo, and a brief, terrible conviction that he had been struck blind, or that perhaps he had died.
He dug a little flashlight out of his pocket and flicked it on. The grim state of their home bobbed into sight, like surfacing detritus from a sunken ship. Clothes lay in careless piles on the floor, unwashed plates and empty or nearly empty glasses—insides rimmed with coagulated syrup from soda and sweet tea—were stacked and strewn across the coffee table. Furtive shapes clicked and darted amongst them, erupting every now and then into violent skirmishes: cockroaches, which had found in his home a kind of Eden. They cloying stench of fried meat and stagnant air covered them like a shroud.
“Jesus, Nick,” Trixie said.
A sound crawled toward them out of the darkness: a broken, lurching squeal, like a rat being ground beneath a boot. It was so alien, and so painful, that he half expected some nightmare creature of tall, scraping bone to amble into view, its jaw swinging loosely beneath a searching, serpentine tongue.
Nick ushered Trixie into his bedroom, located right off the living room, and gave her the flashlight. “Wait here,” he said. “I got more flashlights in here you can light. I’ll be right back.” He shut the door on her, and turned toward the sound coming down the hallway.
It was his mother, in her grandmother’s old wheelchair, looking so much older and smaller than she had before the accident. It was as though some ancient version of herself had bled back through time to confront him, dismayed and death-haunted. A blanket was bunched around her legs, which only barely registered as two thin ridges underneath. She held a votive candle in an ashtray; it was the only light she would permit herself.
“Nickie, you’re home,” she said. “I was worried.”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
“Who’s here?”
“Um . . . a girl. Trixie. She’s my friend.”
“A girl?” She looked at the shut door of his bedroom. “Oh, my.”
“I really don’t wanna do this now, Mom.”
“Please, Nickie. Please. I need it so bad.”
“Godammit,” he said. “Fine. Let’s make it quick.”
“Okay,” she said meekly.
She led him down the hallway, the little candle casting a golden corona onto the wall as she wheeled along, so that it seemed he was following a ghost. They went into her bedroom, which was nearly unnavigable, strewn w
ith clothes and bloody bedsheets, exuding the cloistered funk of a shut-in, even more powerful here than in the rest of the house.
“You gotta wash the sheets or something, Mom. It’s rank in here.”
“I’m sorry, Nickie.” Her voice sounded childlike and bereft, and he felt ashamed of himself.
“Forget it. It’s okay.”
“I know I’ve been a terrible mother.”
Fuck’s sake, he thought, not now. He was determined to head this one off at the pass. “No, you’re not. You just had a hard time.”
“It’s no excuse.”
“Look, can we just do this?”
She said nothing. He stepped into her bathroom and ran the faucet until the water was warm, then filled a mixing bowl halfway full. He pumped a few dollops of soap into it, and dropped a washcloth in. Returning to his mother, he knelt before her and pulled the blanket from her legs. She wore old cotton underwear and nothing else, permitting easy access to her thin, bleached legs, which ended in rough stumps just above her ankles. The calf muscles of her left leg were shaved nearly to the bone; her leg was wrapped in bandages, stained a deep rusty brown.
She touched her fingers to his back, making him jump. “You look just like your father,” she said. “So handsome.”
“Come on, Mom.”
“No wonder this girl likes you so much.”
“You don’t even know that.”
“No, I do. You’re too much like your dad. You even sound like him.”
Nick elected not to respond. He hadn’t seen his father since he was a little boy, and the notion that he was growing into him, like a disease with a single prognosis, was hardly encouraging.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing a girl over?”
He sat there in front of her, looking at her mauled appendages.
“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. She pushed her right leg toward him, the nub hovering just over his right knee. Nick tried to remain stoic as he unwrapped her bandages, the gauze tugging at the scabby undergrowth. A ripe odor wafted from the wound; he closed his eyes and steadied himself against it. Blood still seeped from the place she had shaved more of herself off. He squeezed soapy water from the washcloth and applied it gently to her leg, dabbing the raw areas, wiping down in smooth, clean strokes in the places where the wounds had closed. Nick didn’t cry, but that was no kind of victory; tears would be better than this numb separation.
His mother watched him while he performed these ministrations, her face graced by something like a smile.
When he was done cleaning her wounds, he applied some alcohol to her leg. Then took the bowl of bloody water back to the bathroom, where he poured it into the sink. He returned with fresh bandages, which he wrapped around the leg. His mother’s hand slipped off the armrest and grasped at the empty air; Nick put his own hand into it, and she squeezed it tightly. “If I could change it all, I would, Nicky. I would.”
He shook his head, though she wasn’t even looking at him.
He climbed to his feet, tucking the blanket back over her ravaged legs. He noticed a plate on the floor by her bed, a smear of blood on its face. He stooped to retrieve it. He wondered what she would do when she ran out of leg. He wondered how long it had been since she’d eaten anything cooked.
I should feel something, he thought. Where is the part of me that feels?
From elsewhere in the house, they heard the sound of Nick’s bedroom door opening.
Trixie’s voice floated down the hall. “Nick?”
His mother touched his hand as he moved to walk by. The light from the candle she carried made of her face a study of soft golds and darkness. A Madonna in Hell’s ink. “I want to meet her.”
He built a smile. “We’ll see, Mom.”
He pushed Trixie back into his room. “What the fuck were you doing!”
“What? I was looking for you. Get your hands off me!” She slapped his arm away. “What the fuck!”
He closed the door and sat on his bed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
His room was lit by the crossbeams of six or seven flashlights placed at various opposing points; the net effect was, if not complete illumination, then at least a kind of flat radiance. Though not as distressingly fetid as the rest of the house, his room was still the refuge of a fifteen-year-old boy, and cluttered even at its best. His bed was unmade; a leaning stack of CDs tottered on the edge of his bureau, comprised of bands like Hatecrime and RaHoWa and Midtown Boot Boys; posters of seventies slasher flicks and zombie epics covered the walls. He suddenly noticed that his small collection of pornographic movies, which he had neglected to hide, had been aligned in a neat row behind him across the mattress. He opened his mouth to offer an explanation that would preserve his dignity, but of course there was none. He considered braining himself into oblivion with one of the flashlights.
She leaned against the desk and looked him over. “How often do you do it?”
“What?”
“You jerk off, right? That’s what these movies are for.”
“Um, I don’t . . . .”
“Are you embarrassed?”
He laughed too loudly. “Yeah, I guess, kinda.”
“How do you like to do it? Do you use a lubricant? Spit on your hand or something?”
“Um, no.” His body temperature was escalating to dangerous levels. She looked at his crotch, put her hands on her hips, and cocked her head at an angle.
“Show me.”
“Come on, Trix.”
“Why do you think I came here tonight? Show me.”
He gave up trying to subdue his fluttering heart, hoped she wouldn’t see his hands shake, wondered if she knew that he had never been with a woman before, wondered if that fact blasted from him like bright radiation. He undid his jeans and took his penis out, and began to do as she wished.
“Do it slow,” she said, stepping closer. She watched for a moment, then started to unbutton her shirt. She wore nothing underneath, and she moved her shoulders so that her blouse slid behind her to the floor; she stepped out of her jeans like a woman stepping out of water. Tattoos were inscribed all over her thin flesh; their bright colors made them luminescent in the harsh glow of the flashlights: a snake coiling over her upper right arm and looped halfway down to her elbow; a naked pixie with a devil’s face under her collarbone; a series of words—poems or mysterious lists—beginning at her pelvis and wrapping around her thighs; the crossed hammers over a Confederate flag on the slope of one breast; a black swastika, like a clumsy snare of stitches, on the other. They glowed on her naked body like an incandescent language. He had once heard the phrase “illuminated manuscript,” and although he did not know what such a thing was, he thought that it must be something like Trixie’s body, which was covered with the letters of a holy alphabet, and which was itself a supple word, or a series of words, a phrase which she whispered to him now as she moved his hand aside and replaced it with her own. She moved them toward his bed, and he abdicated himself to the study of her.
“I have fat thighs,” she said. They lay atop his sheets, still naked. The event had lasted only a few awful minutes; he’d spent himself almost immediately, after which she had rolled abruptly off of him and stared at the ceiling. He wanted to get up and clean himself off, but he didn’t know what the protocol was. He felt scooped out, doomed, as though he had seen an emptiness behind the face of things. So he followed her direction and just lay there silently, until this revelation.
He craned his neck and looked down at her thighs. But his attention, despite his honest effort, was drawn powerfully away from them. “They look all right,” he said.
“I got ’em from my mom. There’s nothing I can do about it.” She popped her hands against them, making them shake. “Fuck,” she said.
“Hey, stop. You’
re beautiful.”
“Yeah, whatever. Derrick says they’re good for the movement, though.”
“He said what?”
“Big thighs. You know. Child-bearing hips. It’s our duty to produce pure white babies.”
“Oh.” He imagined Derrick examining her hips, running his hands over them. He was pretty sure Derrick lasted a lot longer than two or three minutes.
“It’s funny when you think about it,” Trixie said. “The things we pass on to our kids. I got my mother’s elephant thighs, which sucks, but I also got my pure blood. Which is, you know, really fucking important. And which I gotta pass on, too. So I guess you can’t complain too much.”
Nick watched the ceiling. They had turned off all but one of the flashlights, which burned like a star in the far corner. Everything in the room threw an exaggerated shadow. “How many kids do you want to have?”
“Five or six, I guess. We got to. White people are the minority now. We’re losing our country. It’s my duty to have lots a kids.”
Nick tried to imagine being a father. He didn’t know what fathers acted like, what they looked like or how they spoke. “I don’t know if I could do it,” he said.
“You’d make a good dad. You’re sweet.”
It was not the word he was hoping to hear moments after losing his virginity.
“What did you get from your parents?” Trixie said.
“I don’t think anything,” he responded after a moment’s consideration.
“You had to get something. Your looks, the way you act. It’s kinda weird, the only way you might get to know something about your dad is through the kind of man you grow into. It’s like a special hidden message he left you, or something.”
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