Black Tickets

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  Her mother was mulatto but she was gone. The grandmother, sometimes crazy, turned circles in the floor. We heard her outside the bedroom door, chanting, or she walked through the house holding eggs in her hands. Old woman at the foot of the bed motioning us to come butta butta butta. She talked nonsense but all of them, seven kids and others drifted in from up and down the road, they watched her. Some days, boiling jimson in a pot, she hung wild dope in a shed they’d used to keep hogs. Shit walked to a powder on the warped floor. She walked sometimes all day back and forth. Billy laughed, called her Ole Lady Mindbender. Hey looka that, he said, his thin lips curled, and she traced eights in the air. Gnarled fingers jabbing close, she cackled. I kept seeing their faces together, the old woman and the girl. The old woman cackling and she, young, with her beige Negro face, had those same gold-irised eyes, but paler against her dark skin.

  Later she talked of her thin brown mother leaving those mines her pap worked, him a doghole miner then, so poor his wife took three of the kids and went to D.C. They rode buses, riding to bars where her mother sang for hamburgers and band’s donations. Finally she whored out of Baltimore hotels, the kids waiting outside on the stoop. Ten-dollar tricks and swarthy short-order cooks. Movie house janitors’ nicotined fingers and doughy thighs of the satin-haired dago cops. Most nights the kids slept below in alley porno shop, warmer there, and Baker, black faggot, kept mattresses in back. Baker, his moony bagged eyes, his old bottles in windows, gave them white gravy and bread at 3 A.M. Alley feet stumbled by his grilled basement windows, size of tomato boxes. It was ’49 and he talked about the war, hiding his knobby hands. Sunk easy in a flushed barbiturate high, he gave the kids Japanese fans GIs had traded for pinups. Filmy cataracts liquid as spaniel’s eyes, he said he ‘got to move dis place up da street, up dere woan hafta burn dese lights all day.’ She and her brothers stole opiated cough syrup he heated in a pan. They stole tuna and steak from the grocery and they ate good some days, upstairs not so cold come spring. Then it was hot, so hot they breathed their own sweat. Their mother laughed, broad mouth stretched tight, eating on carton table in empty grime city rooms. Fans on full, she wore a bra and panties, fed them beer and fried meat. Brown woman, her black hair kerchiefed or pulled back in a knot. High-cheeked opal face, thick-browed, her smell raw in rooms. The heat that summer, and at the hotel there was backed-up plumbing, sad junkies on the roof, hotsummer Baltimore hepatitis. Their mother taken from mattress on floor not talking. At the crowded hospital, they were separated, beds on different floors, white wards, and she, seven years old, thought it was because someone knew they had stolen the food. She and the brother left were sent back to the country, where their father had a woman, more sons.

  She had an older brother at Moundsville, sent up I guess for car theft, big-time state-pen theft. She wrote him letters on schoolgirl’s lined paper, careful not to smudge pencil sketches of the hounds she kept for him. Billy making her laugh would kiss the dogs passionate, holding them tackled in his arms until she ran to him. The dogs jumped, yelping their womanish sounds. Working with her pap on their truck, we drank Dickel, and the dogs, five big loose hounds, nuzzled our hands with their pink snouts. Billy went back to town in the late evening. The rest of them left through the woods to the mission church where the grandmother spoke in tongues and translated what they called the Word. That full-mooned night her pap and me had the engine out in the quiet. We worked together and the church sounded faint through the trees, a distanced animal music come to echo by the house. Don’t like my kids going, he said. It’s hypnosis, some part don’t no one need see. And the women raving, he said, Jesus no lover for a woman. He said it low, corners of his mouth gone soft, his hard face naked. He looked at me, and I thought for the first time that he must have been with her, not now, but long before, and more than once. He seeing me know stood confused and then brought his big arms down fisted. We rolled in the yard and I felt her in his arms in that Detroit room. I tried to say it was all right, I thought she would be all right, but I hit him because he wanted me to. He wanted to be hit, beaten, but he came at me so hard I fell under him, then saw his brutal face go sad. We said nothing, sat there in patched snow.

  Toward spring, Billy left for the last time. Billy in New York with his East Side girls laughed no doubt then seriously talked of this cool-faced girl in her miner father’s house. You’re the good boy here, he told me. I go, he said, you stay. When I first went there alone (that is, everything was changed), we stood in the yard. She feeding chickens made a ck ck ck sound, sucking her cheeks. I watched her lips move, feeling oddly freaked there in the mud yard near the scraggly chickens and their round soulless eyes. Their washed yellow beaks were faded and sharp and her mouth moved, talking them close with some gentle sexual sound. I felt like I’d never slept with her, like both of us, Billy and me, had really only watched her, watched her strange small house and the dirt-scratched farm in big fields, watched the crouched mountains. At first it was like she said, no one around here going anywhere. Then things started moving, sliding; she got to us. When she talked, her curved-edged words ran together, her voice coming low in her throat. There in the yard, early daylight flattened space between us. Seemed I’d never seen her in such light. Always before it was pale. Subdued winter midnights till 6 A.M., the one big bed. Coal stove going and kids asleep in the house. One or two up in the night came in to sleep with us, whimpering. Billy got up first and sat in the chair, reading Revelations out loud drunkenly to himself and she slept close to me. I watched windows in by-then late winter, trees wobbly and the shack buildings pale through the plastic-covered windows.

  Or I saw her in dim lights, warm, like in the pool hall in town those afternoons, dark, and the balls cracking sides under one low light hung from ceiling. She on flat stool by the bar talked maybe to Lowry, the owner, whose breath smelled always of black beans, whom she knew well, having helped his old lady midwife in the county since she was a kid. Solemn by steaming cunts of cousins and her father’s women, she held pans for the hamlike hands of Elva Lowry. Telling me later (long after chickens in cold spring), once they went clear to Pickens in Elva’s Ford, a not-bright woman whooing like a cow for two days. Her one-armed man in the kitchen yelled Shut that up now, and finally the baby birthed breech. Elva, sweating, wrapped it, he frying fat in a shallow pan in the kitchen where she went to wash it. Elva was gone and the woman blathered about jams, about crookberries. Get out there at the pump now, Elva said. Get water, ain nobody finished here. Another baby came. It was blue, its head dented. Elva laid it down. There, she said, let the poor thing go. Women, she said, got the sense of camels.

  In the poolroom Lowry told stories. Elva, he said, was a good doctor till she died her own self. Ain’t that the way. He laughed in the rosy light and wiped glasses with a rag. Behind him the cheap beer signs threw shadows and made his head big on the wall. In that light she was easy to look at, her crossed legs shiny in dollar nylons, her head bent in her hair. Making a shot she never smiled, just chalked her stick and waited. Billy guzzled cold beer and sharpened in the fuzzy room. He sharpened, his face seemed clearer in those half-lights (he said to me in private even then, I got to get out of this). Afterward we’d give her a ride to her place with the groceries. The town looked abandoned with its slope-roofed buildings, even old men on stoops sat alone. Those late afternoons everyone was gone to the mines or to the Carbide plant. Me and Billy full of male laughter told tales, entertaining her but really gaming each other. She scratched her nails slow on the coarse bags in her lap. Billy, mock serious, said he was going to paint this truck in red letters, name it The Triangle. The whole truck smelled of him and beer. His shirt open he howled Hoo Whee, the peddler the priest and the miner’s daughter. She laughed, all of us suddenly sweating. That spring turned hot before he left. He poured cold beer down his neck, in his hair, saying Why does he have to drive this bus Why the hell does he always have to drive. She said Why Billy because you’re the only one got sense enough not to ask ques
tions. All of us got drunk on beer and Cutty Sark and then lay in the creek to sober in cold water.

  She told me later (Billy running coke in the Bowery, heisting TVs in sad-faced apartments for bucks) she’d heard Billy talking. She said sometimes he’d get so drunk she’d find him in the woods outside the house, unconscious, open-eyed, unable to move and mumbling terrified about avenues and sharks. Early spring in the yard that morning it was still cool but the sun was a glassy promised heat. Billy’s eyes were gone but they were close—I felt them in her dress, where she held feed aproned in the cloth, her sounding ck ck ck and the stupid staccato chickens. Going in the house she tripped, the chickens clouding her feet. She called one of the kids in from the woods. He was the youngest, the rest were in school by then. Bubby, she yelled. Come on back here. But he stood still in the yellow field. We started for him and he came, dragging what we thought was rope but as he came closer we saw it was a big blacksnake gaping its harmless mouth. He held it up and we saw its eggs rounded under the hide. He touched its end on the ground and an egg eased out on the grass. The snake, elastic around the shell, tried to coil. The boy looked at us, seemed to forget the snake and left it there on the steps. She stared at it in a way that scared me. I pulled her into the kitchen and she began filling up every pan and kettle in the house with water. The old woman caught on and hauled buckets from the pump. The kid, crowing, hitched up his pants and ran, following her, scuttling in the dirt. The woodburning stove was fired up and thickened the air. The sun got hotter, rubbing on the glass. We opened windows and doors, both of us seeing the swollen snake still on the porch. We moved the big tub to the center of the floor and she burned her hands lugging the heavy kettles. I moved behind her to take them and pressed against her by the wooden tub. The water steamed and I felt her skin under flannel. She was so familiar, the granted smell of her, the dark hay smell. Seeing her firm full-lipped face, I was frightened again by the old stare in her eyes as she’d watched the snake, her stare as she’d watched pitted windows in Billy’s rainy truck. Stopping for gas the day before he left, we’d talked past her and she watched numbers turn on the pumps. Listened. Harsh rake of the nozzle, clunk of its handling.

  I got in the water with her, the big tub smelling of soaked pine. The old woman turned garden outside and the woods were overgrown already (was it April?). We bathed each other, soaped her black-nippled breasts, and the little boy between us was slippery, shivering against us. She rose, dripping water. The wet floor was shaded dark. She wrapped the boy in blankets and put him in a chair. All of it, everything, so slow. Seeming we are in the water for hours, her kinky hair pasted to her back and face in tight curls, she stepping over dogs asleep on the damp floor and me dreaming of us alone in some Southwest, some Canada. She dried me with her hands in bed, her mouth on my eyes. Kunk of old woman’s hoe at the side of the house. We had each other slow, looking at ourselves. Like when he and I came from the mine that first time she took our clothes, put her face to our white stomachs. We drank cheap hot whiskey, kissed her whiskied mouth and she laughed. Our black faces rubbed her shoulders gray. And it gets confused, she, her face on me, silent, oh god easing into her we’re in the dark.

  Slave

  SHE WANTED to have orgasms more and more often. She watched her men have orgasms with their eyes closed, sailing on their breath, and gone. She had the pleasure of helping them leave, and was left in possession of them until they returned. She had memorized faces in that moment of unconsciousness. Many times she was actually seeing that face rather than the face she was talking to, aware that this person whose face it was had never seen that face of himself. So the face became her secret. She herself had a tiny orgasm of fear when she saw someone she loved after a long separation, who usually no longer loved her. Something turned over once in her. She had the same turning ache when reading something suggestive or having a memory of arousal. She had it when she realized she wanted someone. When she masturbated she always had a brief intense orgasm, turning over ten times, and fell asleep released. But she seldom had orgasms with her men. She loved to make love with someone she wanted. They soared away from her arched and paralyzed and for an instant she had what she wanted. There was one man she liked to talk to, whom she didn’t particularly want because he was so much like her. She already had what he had. She could get along without him, because when he came, there was no triumph of conquering their separation and winning him. So she told him that although she liked men she seldom had orgasms with them but only with herself. They talked about it patiently. After that she wanted to make love with him less because her power was exposed and solidified. He wanted to make love with her more but was self-conscious because he was unsure of his power. She felt he was no longer like her but was less than her, and she didn’t want him. The relationship cooled. One day he called her on the phone and a fight ensued in which they each cataloged what was weak about the other. She was getting the best of him so he said Go fuck yourself, since you can do more for yourself than I can anyway. She sat there listening to the dial tone. She knew that he thought her power was uppermost because she could make him come but he couldn’t make her come. He had the secret of what her power was about, but she had the secret of his powerlessness over her. That made him ashamed. He felt lonely but free because he thought there had to be two people to have the question of power. She knew her power over him happened because of her power over herself. The phone began bleeping frantically. Alone, she could feel her power holding her up. But what did that make her?

  Accidents

  I‘M NOT SURE anymore when the first accident happened. Or if it was an accident. Now when I tell you about my accidents you are sympathetic and some of you fall in love with me. Men whose childhoods were slow and smooth want my straitjacket stories. My sugar is a panic that melts on your tongue and leaves a tiny hole in what you taste. Taste me Sugar, I’m fried around the edges. Mom used to say I was born with my eyes crossed. That was a joke she quit telling when I was old enough and wrapped up tight. You feel me spinning and the music’s on too loud. You remember all the little dangers in your past. My body that long sleek car someone spun on curves, Hey you wanna drag? Yeah I’ll do ya, and it degenerates. Six girls giggly drunk jumping out to run circles around an old Chevy at a red light. Hey wait a minute Honey, you dropped somthin. I keep dropping how things went, which story goes where. This week and next week and next week. Somewhere out there’s a winner but I’m losing track. I try to stay home and turn the pages in my books. But the words are a dark crusted black that cracks. Black as wine or water. I keep wading out and the deep part is over my head. I wanna dance I wanna just wrap my legs around you like those rings are round the moon. Lemme press my mouth against you like the rain against the glass it’s see-through. I can see clear out there to the end and I’m alone I’m burning like a fire fuel. I’m hot. I’m hot I’m a streak across the sky. You watch me, now bring me down hard and hold on. It doesn’t matter if I tell one truth or another. I wanna feel a hand on my waist. He and I are through, why don’t you come over? See, I hurt my head again. I hit it on the bed.

  Gemcrack

  SHE IS SITTING in the car and I do my number. Looking down the sight I see an aureole flare to the right and left, all around in haloed flutters. Then it wavers like underwater moons, I have to split, my Uncle doesn’t wait. He says be back, be quick, be reverent. We pray for these great states, for the Great State of the City of New York. We make em break em cart em away, Zing! like a silver cat scratch burning way down where you recognize your name. I make a sound: the letter S, snakes leaving skin to sun. Her head sinks down; I hear the sound and right away I’m fluttering. Gem-stepping down the alley I turn, squeeze off a quick shot and the girl half dazed on sidewalk falls over, lays down like she’s home. And I’m running, rolling round like the eyes of Jesse James. Love is the outlaw’s duty.

  You see me everywhere. I spit on the surface of night, on the rattling backdrops of subway gutter art. I suck you up like erasers.
I am that glittering drop of mercury spilled out a broken glass stick. Mark me in numbers and names of the dead. I take your temperature, your pulse. I have my fingers on your wrist and I will twist it. You suppose I fade as my women fade, buried or barricaded; my women with their swinging hair and their protectors. But no, I am with you though you walk through the lit-up noise of Mondays; I comfort you. I know the accountant’s language of knuckles and swivel chairs, the jostling streets, the department store blues of floorwalkers and lyric radios, the sweat of the laundress scheming in powders and starch, the burger joints deemed blessed by girls in their thin white legs. I love my work. I crack these gems and expose their light in the dark Saturdays, the nights. My Uncle leads me astray into the paths of right thoughts. He holds my hand. Wait, he says, the time is not right—but we will yet have what we need. And surely, what we need comes in its time.