Black Tickets

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  I think Natalie is dead, she said she would die when she was twelve. But only then. In August under trees we sat heaving rocks. She buried her feet in sand and said she was a stone. I could pinch her till my nails rimmed with red; if she didn’t cry out I had to do what she said. She wanted to play house again: I’m a house I’m a giant house. Crawl through my legs Its the door. And she heaved herself onto my back, cupped my chin in her hands. Pulled my head back to see her face above me. She stroked my throat, pointed her pink tongue in my ear and hissed. Shhhh. Hissing. Shhhhhh. Purring, breathing deep in her belly. She pretended her voice was a man. I love you You’re mine Eat your food. And I licked her hand all over, up and down between her fingers.

  Once the man came after us. We were in the shed behind the house. Natalie liked that room with the tools and jugs, rusted rakes, wood in splintered piles and the squeaking rats. She took off her clothes, draped them on random nails to make an armless girl. A man’s big black boots swallowed her ankles. She white and hairless, jingling the metal clasps. Natalie laughing and laughing. We held the blunt-nosed hammers, we threw them hard. Indented circles in the floor, piles of circles pressing down in the old wood like invisible coins. Natalie said we made money. More and more, on the wall, on the floor. Natalie at the windows crashing, glass in glittered piles on her shiny black rubber boots.

  He opens the creaky door. What the hell are you doing. I hide by the workbench, back in the webs and spiders. The unbuckling, quick snaky swish of his belt against his pants. He catches her, throws her over the workbench. Natalie gets quiet, the big boots fall off her feet. Her feet almost have faces, dangling, alabaster, by my face; her thin white legs hanging down. Slaps of the belt and drawn-out breathing. You little bitch. He takes a penny and throws it to shadows in the dust. She knows She always knows She finds it. Handfuls of clattering coins. Natalie walks in her goose-pimpled skin, makes a pile of copper pennies by his shoes. He pushes her down on her knees, Natalie is laughing just a little. I see his back, his wide hips, the green work pants. Touch it, he says. Natalie says she can’t, her hands are poison.

  I’m pure, driven snow. I clean the house, make soup from a can. Wumpy drinks a beer. Squeezes cans till they buckle and fold, throws them in a corner. I want to touch him, squeeze him hard; he closes his eyes to make sounds in his scratchy voice. If I take off my shirt he hits me. Kitty hugs me, My Baby. She wants me to do what she wants. Wumpy does what she says. More and more, she wants what I want. We move around on the checkerboard floor.

  Kitty is on probation. We give her lots of coffee and get her walking. Every Saturday the parole officer wants her to talk. Maybe she scores, comes back with smack in an envelope. Darker and darker, snow feathers down to wrap us up. Kitty nods out on the windowsill, curls up like a dormer mouse in her bulky red coat. She likes to lean out almost too far. Wumpy: I watch him through a lopsided hole in the bathroom door, he wants to be alone. Ties off, bulges a vein to hit. Hums and sighs. Pipes make watery yawns and wheezes, they come together in the tunneled walls. It’s so quiet I hear the click of the neon sign before it changes and throws a splattered word across the floor. Rooms, it says, blue Rooms. When I see someone move, I’m afraid: If Natalie weren’t dead she would find me.

  Mamasita

  MAMASITA GOES OUT after dark to chase the drunks with a stick. And they stumble up the lighted broken steps of the Men’s Social Care Center while the cops laugh at Mamasita. Mamasita hairy and black, drooped red melons in her shirt. Oh Billy Babo you is the plague of your mother, Oh she screams, I will beeet you … And she herds them in. To the showers and the tin cups and the hard horned hands of the cops. She squeeze their nuts, they say Oh mama no. She slap, slap, they say Oh yes mama. Mamasita remembers her daddy, falling up and down steps in the Bowery, poison exhale of his breath, gagging and raging his young drunk curses and she a small fat swab in a corner. How the closet, hunker, press, oh press close, where she sat for hours when he forgot where he put her. How she look up, weepy snot, and him big hands reaching down. How the bottles smell. Dark, thick-edged, and the feet drag on another step. Brothers drunk and flashy, young flashy drunks, cut each other up for bangles oh press close. Mamasita long time ago fat and pregnant gets her jaw broke up. But she feel big now, she is big. Till the drunks, the old ones, tell their whimpers in the dark. Their soft mousy sex, such whisper. Bony crouch on newspaper, cornered swabs. Got nothin get nothin. Mamasita hard as nails. They crouch, pick their crabbed groins there by the lamps. Mamasita, oh she goes out with her stick. She likes the ones so gone they don’t attack, they don’t defend. She feel that soft swab, sniveling girl in her gut, oh she want to kill her. And the frowzy stumblers with their faces cut, with their dank dumb eyes and weighted lids, they look up at Mamasita. Their guts rolled up in tiny balls. Long time ago they roll up their guts, what they got. Got to get somethin mama. Mama. Mamasita with her sausage smell and big stick pouring down. Something ground up, rolled in offal, wrapped in a slick spiced skin. Eat it, eat it up. The pigs roll in their pissed pants up into the light. Because that’s how she wants them, that’s what she wants.

  Black Tickets

  JAMAICA DELILA, how I want you; your smell a clean yeast, a high white yogurt of the soul. Raymond would be happy to tell me you set me up. He’d say somebody had to lay down, somebody had to sail by, somebody had to do lock-up in this cadillac of castles, and I was the shit-bred pigeon. But Raymond never made it with you in the bathtub (What? you said, Raymond, that moody hunch?), bubbles and wavelets slapping the porcelain sides, soap flowers white on your high mongolian cheeks, your wide-open lavender eyes shadowed with the pale green of a young bruise, your lips mouthing a heavenly O of surprise.

  Late at night I think about hitting you. I double my fist and squeeze until the pain makes me tingle. When you fell back on the bed your hair spread out like feathers. I play you over and over in my head until you’re falling so slow the hours pass as your hands move up to shield your face, tips of your fingers rose-tinged and rounded. I read the lines of your palms that are lightened in the glow of the lamp. I kept the bedroom nearly dark for weeks so that when you walked toward me the tilted lampshade by the bed threw an ocher glow on your stomach. But before that I lay watching you; you sat in the chair, smoking and looking at the street. You wore those boy’s shirts, like the ones I wore to school when I was thirteen, button-downs with long tails and cuffed sleeves. Or those knit ones, red and green, open-necked, with the tiny alligator sewn on the chest. Golfer’s shirts. I think about your clothes, their detergent and hot water smell, about pulling them off in the dark. Your insides were muscular, pushing me; it felt like fighting underwater. You liked to be held for a long time with your clothes on, grappling slow and fast on the bed like teen-agers in a black park with the night to kill. You were skinny and you felt like a kid in boys’ clothes. In my head at night a figment of Raymond tells me you still wear those shirts. Does he know about the underpants too? boy’s briefs, thick white cotton. You said they felt good, like diapers, rubbed the sewn ridge in front and your flatness underneath. In bed you drew faces on our legs with a lipstick pencil; faces eating chomped cigarettes, thought bubbles with words above their heads—Harumph! Mmmmmmmmmm—and faces whose heavy earrings pulled their heads to their shoulders. Then you made them crawl like crabs across you, six legs, sideways scuttle.

  During the day you sat in the ticket booth at Obelisk, bennied up and staring at a cardboard wheel, a layered look-alike procession of inch-long coupons that opened the magical doors of the oldest movie house in Philly. While the lady schlumpers walked their shopping bags and weasel-boned spics did musical slides past the window, you got fixed on tickets and watched them like TV, studied them with a dimestore magnifying glass. You drew them, perfect tickets, on your knees: Obelisk Theatre, C Street, Philadelphia, Murphey Enterprises Inc., set off by a wavery line and numbered: 028949, 028950, 028951 … bright orange, that watery bright of crab’s shells. And reversed: The management reserves the right to rev
oke the license granted by this ticket by refunding purchase price. Fuzzy emblem with a centered star, signed S-7, National Ticket Co., Shamaken, PA. You came home with chains of inked-on tickets across your thighs. Geezes, marks, numb doughboys came to the morning shows, dropped inside and pulled their puds to choruses of Nazi blonds while you sat outside behind the glass bubble devising your own tattoos. Like getting fed, you told me, sitting there catching coins as they slid cupped in a wooden curve through the half-moon hole in the bubble. At night there were lots of boys in hats, wop musicians out of gigs, winos looking for a chair. And a few women in boots, aging a bright platinum.

  But days were best. Days were OK. I stood across the street watching you and waiting to make the drop. At first it was sideline stuff, Nembies and speed balls, a little white stuff for the joy bangers who came downtown to cop. I bought a ticket from you, threw the money in that cupped slot and saw your fingernails, blackish violet, catch the silver faces of the quarters. I went inside. Obelisk. The bathrooms were big, horsehair sofa and fan-man carpets worn through, then the white tile floors broken and chipped till the border mosaics were cracked to an ivory powder. We used to cut speed with that powder; all those silky Main Line debs reeling in their mommies’ sports cars, digesting the crumbling universe of Obelisk. Some enchanted evening I whistled old songs you may see a stranger and scooped up the finest particles across a crowded room by the long mirror. Friendly mirror, old art deco; a serious flamingo balanced on one straight leg, big sitting ball of sun going down behind. Urinals rust-stained and scenting out a poison sweet of piss. Obelisk: reduced by the Puerto Rican neighborhood to obligatory porn, cracked frontal filigree, and balcony boxes that could barely support the weight of the rats; cinematic rodents who dragged off whole boxes of discarded popcorn. In the dark you could see the white stripes of the boxes moving smoothly in the corners and along the walls: they had it down to a science. They came along later between shows, chirping, to clean up the flowered kernels they’d spilled in their labors. Ah, the Obelisk rats. How I miss those rangy fuckers. Raymond had fantasies of training them to make the drops, do our work for us. He said they weren’t ordinary rats; they were wise guys, street smart, city old, telepathic. And they were vain, living for generations in the midst of those flaky ornate mirrors and rotted plush seats. We could pay them in little red hats and silk vests scaled to size.

  Raymond had time to hatch plots, sitting in the coffee shop across the street and waiting for me to appear with our hard-earned money. All I needed was a trench coat and a Luger, a banded felt hat to pull down over my eyes. I complained that it was all too elementary. Raymond said of course it was elementary, that’s why it worked. Perfectly. For months. And Jamaica was in good with old man Neinmann. Neinmann couldn’t back out; the dicks would never believe we did our biz there all this time and Neinmann didn’t know it. Besides, smiled Raymond, the old choke had a thing about going back to Germany before he croaked; he was saving his pennies. Raymond nodded, drumming his fingers and their rippled whitish nails on tabletops, ducking his head, his jacket humped like he had a sweatshirt wadded up in it. He said he was just a nice Jewish boy, doing his bit for reverse reparations. Reptilian Raymond, slow speech and cherub mouth, his head darting forward in those jerky chin-stretching movements like some tousle-headed turtle. Droopy blue eyes, movie star jaw, Raymond: Quasimodo with the head of an angel, walked with a hesitant lurch and dragged one foot. He said he was, obviously, conspicuous; I would make the drops, he would keep things clean. And Neinmann, that old storm trooper, slouched by the projection booth giving hell in his diluted German rotgut to the Filipino projectionist. Jamaica, you thin wonder in schoolboy clothes, I could crush them all into a burlap bag full of stones and watch them sink in a sewer named for you. Jamaica, like pieces of wood in my bloodstream; turning your head away from me on the street, walking ahead of me up the stairs with your straight shoulders, saying nothing, even your footsteps sounding arrogant, luxurious, secretive; slide of your shoes on worn rubber-treaded steps. I always listened, thought I would find something out and use it. You liked me to use what I knew. Sweet Jamaica, who was never innocent. Each time with you was one more chance to crash through.

  Women and stomachs. Here we go nowhere. My cell door is identical to the rest of my wall-with-a-view, and to think my old man broke his ass to put a picture window in his suburban clap-trap house. Bungalow, my mother called it. Bungalow, deep in the forest green. Honeymoons and champagne. He rode the train in every day and sat at the fake-maple dinette at night. I wish I could say she diddled the grocery boy, but that was the woman next door. Our esteemed neighbor locked her kid out of the house when the delivery boys came around, and I sat, like a preschool obedience course graduate, with that rejected sniveling bimbo in the back by the scratchy hedges. Inside his mother was having her jollies and my mother did worse; she watched them with binoculars like the prize champ she was. A charming 3-D view. We bust our balls to start out small and keep moving. Numberless advancements. Jamaica: the last time I moved up I got to you, got inside and forgot the rules. Unpardonable infraction. Admit one, two. Admit where you got your information. Officer, I got it from the corner machine; multicolored pornography individually wrapped. A subtle gradation of desire at inflated prices. It’s obvious I’ve graduated. Three days here and the trustee speaks to me; I eat in the courthouse dining hall. The last time, a county jail in Florida, statutory rape, they let us out of eight cells into a hallway to eat. Then we lined up and scraped our leavings into the one toilet, flushed it, watched burbling chicken bones and mashed potatos engage with green peas in a smear and gush of water; reminding you of all your sick vomits in bathrooms of restaurants, theaters, gas stations, train depots—all of it coinciding in a rush; exactly how it felt, how it smelled, your head on the bowl, knees on hard floor, cold sweat of the porcelain, nothing to grab, bird’s-eye view, intimate stains of countless patrons, high whishy flow of the plumbing, eight running commodes, drip of the sinks, your feet sticking out of the stall, occasional footsteps of witnesses cutting a wide swath …

  Jamaica, in sickness and in health. I was sick the day you found me, having hit Philly on the lam after paying off one greasy Floridian uncle and waving good-bye to underage cracker girls. I bought your drinks in that bar beside the tenement walk-up and followed you out, got you in the chipped green doorway of the building, wanted to beat or crush or fuck that two-day bus ride and week in the southern slam out of my swollen head. I touched your legs and felt for you through your clothes, thought from the way you looked, walked, that if I pressed myself against you and pushed, you’d come back at me. I knew you wouldn’t scream. You reached down and unzipped me, keys still in your hand, your warm surprising fingers on my balls, tight, and you touched me with the cold metal, pressing; how the breath went out of me and came back in one steely point. You said to step away and follow you upstairs. When you took those keys away to open the door I could have broken your face. Jamaica Delila. Later I forced the name out of you; hearing it like falling into jungle my mother only dreamed about with her bungalow stories pressed between her legs. Jamaica: not the usual dance. You were falling; I could slap you and push you, keep you moving, falling and falling; it was like you hit on your back with a snapping sound and water sprayed all around us. Then you went under; I didn’t feel you.

  I wake up alone here at night and the guards are playing poker in the hall. I hear the money rolling, touch the ridged bricks of the wall I’m shoved against, have rolled close to like some newborn rattish creature longing for the nearest suckle. I can taste the skin of your arms; I hate you. And when I fall asleep again into the black, the slap of the cards follows me, constant, funereal: slapping engines of driver-less hearses long enough to carry the box of the body, and the slapping feet of the men that follow the box. They have no faces and they feel with the whiskers of dogs.

  Animal churches, clutch and clutter. Tempo of the vertical beat danced in amyl dreams. Raymond wanted to cash in on th
e sex quiz; join the rest of them down there at the bottom of the gorge. Boxes of amyl packaged in a gross of drugstore inhalers or small perfume bottles with cork stoppers: items the hipsters long for. Added attractions, said Raymond, those little extras to close down the days and promote orgasmic endings: Gene Autry riding into coral skyline while the cacti stand up ancient and timeless as Lucifer. Legions of pretty boys loving each other up to the tune of the late show and spinning off like random pinballs in the flash of the nitrite wizard. Feel that grand connection coming on and you quick twist off the cap to inhale, the room goes out in a blue staccato and you’re hammered to the finish by yourself in a storm and a roller coaster. Jamaica, you loved it, taking the ride alone and seeing the sights in some neon hieroglyphic Persian while I held your hips and watched the X’s come up in your eyes. You wanted it every day, all night, you wanted me to get you to the starting gate, pump you up for the real trip and keep the house from falling when the floor moved: it was like fucking an electric zombie, a stiff-legged gazelle shuddering in northern catatonia. Like dying in the snowdrifts, Jamaica, moving on the floe of your body, white and cold for miles. And I could wonder about shaking you until the ice cracked and all the deep black poured out, textures of blacks: black of thick tar, black of satin, corduroy black, waxen and petaled black of death masks, orchid black, black of cashmere beds and the moonless impetigo night, cancer black and black of inheritor insects, black of wet rope and burns and black and black and black I saw in your icy throat. I pulled you up and shook you limp; Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks. My hands were big enough to kill you. I threw you down and ran into the next room, clouded, coated with you; picked up that shoe box of delicates, amyl nitrite in old Fabergé, Coty, Arpège bottles, and threw it against the wall. The smell came up around us, liquefying air; for six blank seconds I felt you under me again, twisting your black stripes. Raymond stood up to hit me with a nightstick some cop had given him for bennies, and Neinmann rotated his skeletal head to watch the fray; but it was when you came in, wildhaired and wrapped in a sheet, that he rocked back and put up his translucent stick-fingered hands. Even then he knew more than I knew. Neinmann: now he knows all there is; the finish, the big bang.