Black Tickets

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  I might have finished with my hands at your throat. Where would we all be if I had; Obelisk still a destitute fortress and Neinmann holding court a few thousand richer, rejoicing like a fascist Munchkin in his broken-down Aryan heart: witch, witch, the mean old witch, the wicked witch is dead. And Raymond, where would he take his services; where would he find a seer, a Mafioso Beatrice like yourself, a movie house scam the length and breadth of C Street? He watched me but you watched him. Watched him and touched him, kept him in your apartment like an accomplice court jester. And me Jamaica, I’d be in one of several Bolivias mourning your loss, bleeding my own menses of regret at blowing the tracks of the only train that could push me past a raunchy perfection; a save-my-soul rattle only the devil searches out. I love you the way I love nightmare, secrets coming up like smoke through a grid; the way I love mirrors shattered but still whole, reflecting the foolish image in a hundred lit-up fragments. No one else could take me; pay my way with what your skin knows.

  What about your heart. You dreamed it stopped and woke up with it pounding in your head, scraping across your insides like the interminable drag of a foot toward some dead end. You gasped in your sleep then sat up swinging, like a man parting water for air. You wouldn’t let me touch you. You put on your clothes, went to the living room and sat down in a chair opposite the couch where Raymond slept. He would feel you in the room and wake up, sit across from you in his blankets, eyes trained on the wall past your face. You said he could help you because he wouldn’t look, just kept his eyes open until you could sleep again. Then, when you were quiet, he picked up your feet and held them in his hands. He put them in his lap and sat there, holding on. Finally he looked at the ceiling, stayed absolutely still. I know because I stood, prize son of my prize mother, and watched him from the dark hallway. I saw him turning on the axis of your legs. Once he bowed his face and put the clean ball of your foot to his forehead.

  It was a ceremony I couldn’t duplicate. I went back to our room and lay on the white bed. It started rotating slowly; I pressed my hands on the flat sheets; they were soft and worn, smelling of you. It was me in that room, in your bed, not him. He could bring you around by not looking; you went away from me to let him; but it was me that saw you, and the games were not really games. Who sees you now Jamaica, how many of them ever did. I got close, inside, in the whirling. Or maybe you kept me out, crouched in your fetal hum, but I knew where you were and mapped a tonal geography no ear could name; found you with a sonar plugged into that music of dark feedback that shoves us. With you I’m blind as those flying rats with monkey faces whose ears are the one miraculous inversion that keep them feeding themselves. Jamaica, I fed you whatever you wanted; sometimes I wouldn’t stop.

  Raymond was the icing on the cake. You kept the history vague; said you met him through friends who had grown up cracking meters together on North Broad Street. A few small deals later he was there and needed a place and didn’t ask for anything; you wanted someone alive in the rooms at night besides yourself and the roaches and the traffic sounds and the street yells floating up past the windows. Maybe he was some kind of brother; he didn’t talk too much, kept enough money around and knew how to get more. I moved in and you got the job at Obelisk; things picked up. I did the running; operations got smoother and bigger. Clockwork. I think about you out there walking on cement; the tick of your heels. Jamaica, whose clock was it?

  You said Raymond was born to grow into that body, that hump like rhinoceros armor, his arms powerful and a little too short. He lifted weights every day and went to a welfare therapist twice a week, but he would end like a bug with its wings and lower thorax crushed, lurching in dwarfed circles on a sidewalk. He was arthritic; the disease crept up, would get worse and put him in a metal chair he could turn on with a switch.

  He was gone most evenings, ate supper in a deli down the block and threw dice in a bar until late. We sat in our room with cold bottles of cheap Chablis and you told me he was usually in pain and got a lot of dope legally; that’s how it started, he lucked into a doc who was a writing fool and then pushed those scripts on C Street until he was famous. Maybe too famous. I was convenient; I eased that particular pain.

  Sometimes he gave you the creeps; he always knew it and disappeared for a few days. You touched my back, my chest, pulled my legs around you. We were alone and the rooms seemed bigger, stretched. We stayed naked in the daytime and made it, no amyl, on the kitchen floor. But by the time he came back we were ready for the sounds of him making coffee on the stove in the mornings, sitting in the corner place at the table, big-chested, Lancelot hair uncombed and so black the shine was purple, bent over acrostics and newspaper crosswords. It was tempting to see him as the handsome Jewish jock he would have been and he killed that temptation with a glance.

  Maybe in those dreams you saw him crumpled up like a stunted spider, his back having taken him over. I told you I didn’t know why he hung around for the slide, waited for that slow engagement to suck him in. You mentioned certain continual numbers, said I would wait too, anyone would, wait forever, because this was the only show in town.

  Once we went walking by the junk stores and you bought a boy’s cap, an old woolen one with a snap brim and gold silk lining. Knickerbocker Superior Caps, said an oval inked label the size of an egg, and it showed a wigged colonial with a ruffled neck and a cane, ringing a bell. You tucked your hair inside it and strolled, casual, by the mirror, making faces at me and pretending to twirl a walking stick. You looked for a long time at the cigar holders and penknives in the glass cases, and finally I bought you a miniature switchblade with a pearl handle.

  I was born in the West Indies, you told me, And when we got here my mother sold my ass right out from under me. She did it with all the girls, five of us, until we got into our teens and left home. She used to say our father left her because of us, and now we could take care of things. No one ever really hurt us, mostly playacting and harmless perv trips. I was the boy but she never let me cut my braids; I wore them up, like this, in hats.

  We were supposed to meet Raymond and Neinmann in a bar close by. We sat down and I asked what happened to that queen of a mother. She aged fast, you said, Selling meat is hard work. Her standard of living went down considerably after we all left her. I hope she died in the gutter.

  I asked if that tale about your father was a lie. Of course it was, you said, We all had different fathers.

  I looked down the street, watching for our cohorts. It made me nervous to meet with them in public. Maybe they aren’t coming, I said, Maybe they’re all enjoying that same crowded gutter.

  They’ll be here, you said. Raymond always shows, and Neinmann will be around as long as we want him.

  You bent your face to light a cigarette, hard jaw and downy cheeks framed in the blousy cap. I forced your hand into the ashtray and crushed the lit tobacco. You think you’re moving us around like little girls, I said, What about me, Jamaica? Think I’ll always show?

  You looked me in the face and smiled. No, you won’t show, you told me, But you’ll always be right where you need to be, whether I want you there or not.

  One show is like another. In the exercise yard the men walk one of a dozen figure eights, trace their own dead tracks, wear a subtle trench the width of a beagle’s body. The far wall is covered with ivy and they head for that green color. On a quiet windy day I stand close and the small stiff leaves are flapping on the stone like hands that know one language. I work my fingers through the tangled viny stems and the wall is mossy, dumb, packed with cool soil in the cracks. Earthworms live in the dirt, eating their tunnels. I see them loop in the leaves, fat and pink, trail a lubricant smelling of ripe insides. Around their middles there is a swollen band that veiled and bluish tint of flushed skin. Press it and the worm rears a faceless end, delicate, smelling the air.

  Inside is the clammy clank and slap of anywhere’s jails. In a few weeks I’m on my way to the pen, big-time gleam where I learn a new career and swim awhil
e in the underbelly of that metal whale. The whale eats what it’s thrown and hums like a city. During my wait the heat drops by every day, smooth heat from the DA’s office in expensive suits. No more street games; it’s big bucks, crooked rumba of the dodg’em politicians. They tell me the whole story again: Neinmann in the burned-down Obelisk, a four-alarm fire in the A.M., and the old man crouched like a pile of spindled ash in the office by stacks of used reels. How like Raymond to fry Neinmann in his own thick oil, and do it so they can’t prove arson. Or maybe Raymond didn’t set it at all. And maybe it wasn’t an intended deliverance I got handed the day the heat picked me up at that phone booth waiting for his call; maybe it wasn’t them who were supposed to find me. Who was I waiting for? Jamaica, I like to think you had at least devised something quick for me; just a flash, an imprint before the black came up. Sometimes, lately, I like to think you devised nothing at all; that the sacred goons I imagine came down on you cleanly; that you’re neck-deep in darkness yourself; then I turn off the light in my head and, like a fool, hope you’ll be around to settle up with. Tomorrow I’ll sing and sell you all; but, one way or another, you’re all gone aren’t you? and your names were only stories.

  One, ten, twelve. Talk to me; go first. Games for two, trade sides and roll. Hold me; your back a broad olive blade that sharpens, slick with moisture, if we keep going. I could drink you up; lay down. I hold you like a baby, tell you I really love you, say words you like and then start dreaming on the downs, fading, passing through, big truck labeled with a bright red blur. You run the tub full of water before I’m too gone and walk me there in the fluid drunk of the pills. In the water you hold me under my arms, move the wet cloth on my skin and finally pull me over you, soapy and sleep-heavy. Water closes to our necks as you slide down under me; I keep my face on your skin to breathe and see your black body in silhouettes, a string of paper cutout dolls with joined hands who join hands around me, rumbling a thin white noise; and as they open their mouths I see their phosphorescent teeth glow a pale arpeggio. In the water obsidian beetles surface, doing their six-legged swims. I touch their hard shells and they crack, spill a silver mercury the thickness of fish eggs. It clouds the water slowly, furling and smoky; in the smoke I see your hands moving water to reach me. When you touch my flesh I slide out of it and wake up standing, propped by your arms, your knee, the cold tile wall. I feel the cloud still seeping from you and it dries on my hand, cracking to a pile of charcoal numbers; dim serial of odd and even, a catalog of fools.

  At first, all the girls wore dresses. There was a checkered flag of separation and the race was nothing on a board laid out with paper money and plastic hotels for Park Place. There were metal hoops to make points in and the balls sectioned off like melons in orange and black. The rules were written down and smeared in a fruity juice on all our faces.

  The morning before I never saw you again, I opened my eyes and your shorn hair was all over my naked front. You had cut it to a jagged bowl around dawn, standing over me with scissors and scattering the pieces.

  The Powder of the Angels, and I’m Yours

  SHE REMEMBERED swerving, cocaine lane, snowy baby in her veins. Like a white sock over her nose, smelling clean cotton in dark halls of the seedy Plaza in Bogotá. Roaches glittered their hard backs and the heavy Spanish flies buzz-droned, fucking in midair. She met Hernando on the street in Cali, a few blocks from the English school her parents had chosen to rehabilitate her. He was high, strutting around with a red flowerpot on his head and a green umbrella stuck in his hip pocket. ’Tis Our Lady of the Stamens, he said to her in English. The rich Americana. Daddy a government stoolie with a crazy daughter, screaming since puberty about those voices under beds whose instructions aren’t clear. Paranoia, she told the psychiatrist, sounds like an exotic liqueur. You drink it down hot and it makes you shake. Hernando bowed and the clay pot smashed on stone.

  She stole money for him. For his mouth biting her fingers as he slapped her hips and ground against her. Careening down midnight streets in her mother’s long silk scarf, his body was a luminous black. They shot up in moss-walled bathrooms, blunt needle sinking like a nail’s foot while jet-haired Catholic whores called from doorways. Sí, el polvo de los angeles, yo soy tuya. Tuya. Tuya. She took photographs of his sinewy marked arms and sent them to her friends in the States. They ran coke and smack across the border in a flatbed truck with two borrowed babies and some goats tied in back. Their stench in the flat heat, Hernando dozing, his hands fisted. She felt them being devoured in the carnivorous satin flower of Colombia. They pulled off the road and squatted behind a chicken coop to fix. She saw he had done too much, his eyes glazed. The coke came up in her throat. She grabbed the needle from him and stuck it in a squawking rooster. Hernando hit her in the mouth, the maggoty chickens beating them with wings. A farmer came running out of the dirty house with a machete yelling Monstruos, Monstruos. She dragged Hernando to the truck, the farmer’s bare feet chanting in the dust behind them. The dark babies looked up at her.

  Rain in Washington for three weeks, first her uncle’s house and now the sanitarium. She could see. Arlington Cemetery under gray pellets, rows of dumb stones. Embroidery. She pulled the thread in and out, working the plumed tail feathers. They asked her why she damned herself, they asked her why she didn’t. All day Sunday the ministers came with their pamphlets. She liked to watch the priests in their feather-stitched robes. Blessing their vials of water, they touched fingers to the foreheads of the monstrous. Domine domine, they crooned, as each angel closed her eyes.

  Stripper

  WHEN I WAS fifteen back in Charleston, my cousin Phoebe taught me to strip. She was older than my mother but she had some body. When I watched her she’d laugh, say That’s all right Honey sex is sex. It don’t matter if you do it with monkeys. Yeah she said, You’re white an dewy an tickin like a time bomb an now’s the time to learn. With that long blond hair you can’t lose. An don’t you paint your face till you have to, every daddy wants his daughter. That’s what she said. The older dancers wear makeup an love the floor, touchin themselves. The men get scared an cluster round, smokin like paper on a slow fire. Once in Laramie I was in one of those spotted motels after a show an a man’s shadow fell across the window. I could smell him past the shade, hopeless an cracklin like a whip. He scared me, like I had a brother who wasn’t right found a bullwhip in the shed. He used to take it out some days and come back with such a look on his face. I don’t wanna know what they know. I went into the bathroom an stood in the fluorescent light. Those toilets have a white strip across em that you have to rip off. I left it on an sat down. I brushed my hair an counted. Counted till he walked away kickin gravel in the parkin lot. Now I’m feelin his shadow fall across stages in Denver an Cheyenne. I close my eyes an dance faster, like I used to dance blind an happy in Pop’s closet. His suits hangin faceless on the racks with their big woolly arms empty. I play five clubs a week, $150 first place. I dance three sets each against five other girls. We pick jukebox songs while the owner does his gig on the mike. Now Marlene’s gonna slip ya into a little darkness Let’s get her up there with a big hand. The big hands clap an I walk the bar all shaven an smooth, rhinestoned velvet on my crotch. Don’t ever show em a curly hair Phoebe told me, Angels don’t have no curly hair. That’s what she said. Beggin, they’re starin up my white legs. That jukebox is cookin an they feel their fingers in me. Honey you know it ain’t fair what you do Oh tell me why love is a lie jus like a ball an chain. Yeah I’m a white leather dream in a cowboy hat, a ranger with fringed breasts. Baby stick em up Baby don’t touch Baby I’m a star an you are dyin. Better find a soft blond god to take you down. I got you Baby I got you Let go.

  El Paso

  DUDE

  SEE I’D MET this old dirt farmer in a bar the night before. Said he was selling his truck cheap and I could come down to La Rosa and pick it up. Said three hundred dollars and it didn’t run too bad but I’d better buy it now. So I hitched down Sunday morning, mud chur
ches on all three dirt streets ringing their black bells. I found him wringing a chicken’s neck in the yard, did it quick and finished before he looked at me. Dark seamed face under a broad hat and the chicken head a little dangling thing hanging out his fist. I told him, said I’d come about the truck, did he still want—thinking we were both pretty drunk and he might have dreamed he had a truck, since it didn’t look like he had anything but a shanty house that leaned right into dirt. He spat and turned for me to follow him, holding the chicken now by a splayed leg that was bright orange in the rising heat. The nails on his hands were colored that same dull shine as hen’s claws.

  Us walking in the dust yard past old tires and a rotten bedspring, mule tied to a pump by the chicken shed, and he stands finally by this thing that’s a red fifties Chevy with a built-on bed shelved with chicken cages. Crosses and a blackened corn husk doll hanging from the mirror, keys strung on a hair ribbon. I got in and drove around the yard fast, chickens squawking and the old cur dogs snapping at the wheels. The old man squatted where he was, plucked the hen. Feathers flew and dropped as I pulled up. I said the truck ran good and if he had the title I’d pay him now and take it.