Kat looked up and saw us all staring. Her eyes filled with childlike, all-encompassing rage. A raw antagonism. The words were salt in open wounds. Her anger and hurt erupted in a sinister cyclone. Her arms pointed at the ends into hard little fists. Her face lost its halo of fogginess.
“I’ll kill you!” was all that she said. She glared right at Jimmy James when she said it. High-pitched—in a cat’s yowl. The words echoed in my brain. I heard her screeching on St. Louis nights: I’ll kill you. It bounced back at me like a mountain lion’s howl: I’ll kill you. It was a promise: I’ll kill you. The words made me shiver.
But the Man from Angel Road had spoken. There was no arguing. He stalked out of the living room. Slammed the hollow back door. I watched his long shadow from the porch light as he lit up a cigarette.
Kat trembled in her ratty Converse shoes and stared at me—the one who watched her trip and fall. She looked at Annie and me in an accusatory way. “Vera Violet O’NEEL!” she shrieked. “Annie KISS!” She flung her gaze angrily from one of us to the other. We had whole names. First and last. Names and bodies and souls that belonged to us. My sweaty hands found the back of her neck. I didn’t think about it but pushed her toward the door. She spilled across the carpet flailing. Screamed and howled as if my touch were burning her. I kept pushing her. She was small and frail. I thought about how Colin wandered in and out of the kitchen on Cota Street. Kept assuring me the stains were still there. He splattered bleach across the spot on the wall that had been painted with Monique’s paintbrush—tried to obliterate the mark where his head was used as a palette.
Kat rolled once down the front steps. Found her feet at the bottom and brushed the dirt from her jeans. She didn’t turn around. She swished her hips haughtily down the worn dirt path. Kicked at the river rocks. I watched in awe as she scampered along the wooden fence and dove into bushes and shadows. She moved so quickly and with such agitation that I did not notice the square corners of Annie’s small diary in the front pocket of her sweatshirt—stolen from the corner of the coffee table where Annie had left it in a moment of distraction. She took it right in front of our eyes—a true thief. Fitz laughed nervously behind me. I watched Kat’s stooped running.
I turned to Fitz after Kat was out of sight. I told him the chicken breasts were done, drew his pack of cigarettes from his front pocket, took a bottle of reservation wine from the pantry, and locked myself in Brady and Annie’s room with Kat’s notebook. I curled up in their bed.
Nobody disturbed me for a while.
Kat’s writing was hectic and filled with underlines and words all in caps. The pages had mostly been torn out. There was only one story she wanted the Man from Angel Road to read. I drank a long swallow of cheap blush and closed my eyes before I began reading Kat’s words:
I was 12 when I left. The age eleven had been a word—steady and lyrical, gorgeous with the hills and valleys of a woman. It was sensuous to say. It rolled off my tongue—eleven. When my age turned my life took a nosedive. 12 is a number—a 1 and a 2. It is uneven and the 2nd half is ready to fly away from the rest at any moment. 1 and 2 have so little in common.
I got kicked out of school because I stopped talking after my birthday. It made my teachers shiver—they didn’t like to think of why I would stop talking like that. I bought a ticket to Portland with a fistful of stolen twenties. I traveled south in the half-light of summer. It was when I was 12 that I started saying you instead of I.
I wanted to be somewhere else. So I could breathe and be clean. Not feel sticky in my sheets in my tiny room without a door. I needed a door with a doorknob and a lock. I wanted one so badly. So I could lock myself in. And lock other people out.
He watched me walk up the steps of the bus. The only seat open was in front of him. The bus started moving. The sun was setting. I had to sit down. He wore clean clothes—a suit and tie. He was a businessman taking the bus. He talked sweetly with me about books, authors we both loved. He made me believe in magic. He let me borrow some of his. Male-endowed power. Suit supremacy. Business-lingo authority. He was entitled. I thought he would entitle me, surely.
He could see inside me, underneath my clothes, what happened in my bedroom that wasn’t private. HE KNEW! Back then I was alive and angry—I still used Is instead of yous.
SAVE ME, I said with ruined, hopeful eyes. I was stupid. How could he know Kerouac and James Joyce and Walt Whitman and be bad? The shame burned all over—everywhere I looked. HE enjoyed it. HE was just like all the rest. HE liked the pain and devastation of my skinny, hunched shoulders.
HE said, “take a look at those yellow-brown eyes. You’re a little Lolita if I ever saw one.”
LOLITA!
I shivered and just kept shivering all over. My heart beat faster. I closed my eyes and tilted my head so it rested against the window. HE wouldn’t let me sleep. HE knew too much. Too many secrets. He was THE SECRETS MAN.
Clara always said I was “like an alley cat you never really owned.” Clara said yous instead of Is. She made herself not a person—she took away her responsibility. She would say,
“You do so much for her! She makes it IMPOSSIBLE for you to love her!” Clara wanted me to do those things I was tired of doing. That stuff my step-dad wanted me to do.
I told her “I sure as HELL didn’t ask to be born.” And I meant it. I said I without feeling bad. I was Kat—a person. Clara doesn’t love me when I don’t do what my step-dad tells me to.
I learned to shut my eyes very tightly when I obeyed—when I “helped them out.” I listened to the rain on the roof. The neighbor’s tabby sometimes stared at me through the curtains on the window.
THE SECRETS MAN made me drink whiskey with him. He told me to. He pushed a flask toward me and his fist had 2 pills in it. I took the flask from him. I swallowed the pills. I knew all about whiskey. I wanted it so I could sleep on the bus and ignore his eyes looking at me.
The whiskey was like the bile at the back of my throat that came up afterward. Clara always made a nice breakfast for me. Breakfast even if it was the middle of the day! Clara forgot everything that happened in between her fixes. The only times that were real for her were the times before and the times after. Each after was a bright new day. The time for breakfast. She made pancakes that caught in my throat—pancakes from the mixes that the church gave us. I didn’t want to eat the breakfasts and Clara always yelled at me to do it anyway. UNGRATEFUL! she would scream. “She’s always ungrateful!” Clara usually washed my sheets and then went to the bedroom with my step-dad. They stayed back there for days on end. Depending on how much I was worth that time. It was less and less as I got older and the number of men grew. And they got more and more desperate.
I swallowed that whiskey all in one gulp. I kept his flask—I shoved it into my backpack.
Because I was an alley cat that was impossible to love.
Sometimes I think about the library that I used to go to when Clara and my step-dad were not sick in the back bedroom. The library didn’t have the shadows that my house did. I could read there. When I was on the bus I thought about that library. I closed my eyes to remember exactly what it looked like. The alcohol on my stomach fuzzed my brain. I hadn’t eaten all day. I thought those pills were going to burst my heart. I felt the bus move back and forth slightly on the highway—the long stretch of I-5. I could feel the red-rimmed eyes on me and a hand on my leg.
My dreams turned to twin blades of grass. I imagined I was in a Tolkien novel. I always wondered why I couldn’t be an elf or a hobbit or something else small and pure and happy. My dreams got weird. I slid down a very thin tip of velvet grass. I slithered into black water. I grew thick along with the grass. I sped up as the blade tilted. I hit bottom. I thought about where I was and where I should be. No one place was safer than the other. I slipped up on the other end of the grass blade. It was like a roller coaster. It did not end. It was a circle that went around and around. It moved me. Then it was only the gentle swaying of a bus. My horrible bo
dy and the wind. I was blown around by the poetry of the Secrets Man. He was talking about grass with roots of dark gelatinous water, roots that collected underneath the earth. I felt like I lived there in the dirt. With the pools that looked like bitter, brown syrup. The acid that ate into me when it touched me. I thought that I must be Gollum instead.
Then I realized I was only a sullen, human girl who tempted poor men like the Secrets Man. I felt sick from the Jack and pills. I opened my eyes and saw the lights of Portland reflect off the raindrops running down the glass against my face. I went with the Secrets Man because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. My money was gone from my pocket. I couldn’t fight him to get it back. Nobody would have believed that he stole it. And the cops would have made me go home or locked me up. I knew what I was getting into. I helped him out for two months before my step-dad found me. He showed up with shaky hands and a stupid .22. He took me back. I kept running away and the cops kept bringing me in. Finally, when I went after my mom with that butcher knife they put me in juvenile detention in Chehalis. I ran away from there, too. But Clara stopped looking for me.
I quit reading after that. I don’t fuck with fantasies no more. I forgot all the words I used to know. I started saying you instead of I.
You just can’t win. You gotta do what you gotta do.
I felt deflated after reading Kat’s words. I got up and paced around the bed. I felt like puking. Annie heard me bumping into things. She knocked gently. I let her in, and she looked at the floor. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy Kat’s story in the woodstove as I had planned. Just how Brady couldn’t stop himself from buying the pistol. And Fitz hadn’t stopped Kat from crossing the threshold into the trailer. I handed the notebook to Annie. I didn’t say anything.
Kat disappeared with the money she stole from Duane’s mama’s jewelry box (six hundred dollars in total from the pawned wedding ring and grocery money). Plus three hundred dollars from the stolen gun and box of bullets. She vanished with no story. Nobody looked for her.
18
BREMERTON
Kat rented a room in a brown-and-white house that tumbled down a steep hillside overlooking the sound. Across the water: Seattle. She could hear seagulls and smell the oily ocean water. During the day, she crouched in the dark corners of her room and stayed hidden. She tried to walk the straight line Jimmy James told her about. But she had trouble. She started out with a simple, dead-end job and cleaned up for a while. But her hands shook with anxiety. Her mind thought crazy thoughts. She couldn’t quit hooking. There was no explaining and no one who listened. She had no friends. She couldn’t stay clean. But she swore there would be no more crazy stuff. No more meth or crack. She became a closet junkie. Like suburban jocks. A bedroom addict hiding pills instead of needles. It was easier. She drank more than she would have had there been friends around. She drank and drank—became more bitter and lucid as her lonely intoxication grew. She planned to come back to David after a long, long time.
She would show him.
Thoughts of the Man from Angel Road boiled her blood. Made everything in front of her indistinguishable—tinted red from her terrible, frenzied fury. The navy boys thought of her as a dumb, shy, country girl. They felt sorry for her. Gave her cigarettes and wine and cocaine. They told her things they wouldn’t have told anybody else. They thought she didn’t understand most of it. They dumped all their garbage out—made insidious confessions of things they had done.
Kat walked home the same way every morning. Ate a TV dinner. The dinners were always the same kind: One piece of gray meat. A soggy vegetable. Runny, mashed potatoes. She took her pills—one and a half. Sometimes she smoked them. Sometimes she swallowed them.
She slept quietly, dreamed silently. But she had only one dream in which:
Her pituitary is pumping out strong messages. It is dark and he is asleep. She crawls through his window into his bedroom. She is lithe and sneaky. She rubs her cheek against his skin and claims him. She is sinewy. Dark. Graceful. She moves gently against him—breathes in his scent. She noses at his armpits, his groin—where the hair holds the strongest odor. Inhales long and deep. Hindquarters in the air, entire body attune.
He stirs and wakens.
He watches with the light off as she crouches in the corner. Her tail twitches. She paces back and forth. She makes low, growling, whoofing noises. Throws her voice. Screams like a woman. He turns his back confusedly to look around—see who else is there. His bedsheets fall from him. His strong lats flex. It is her one chance. She launches herself. Feels the hard plate of her chest hit his back between his shoulder blades. She uses all her strength—her weight. His arms fly out. The wind is knocked out of him.
Her claws dig into his eye sockets, her tail twitches in ecstasy, the muscles ripple underneath her fur, her canines sever his spine.
The taste of blood, the silent struggling, his body slowly collapsing underneath her . . .
Kat moaned in confusion from her dreamworld in her twin bed in her friendless rented room. Nobody heard her. An ambulance rumbled the walls. Its siren sounded long and red into the bustling morning. She stirred only slightly.
She woke trembling from her dream every evening. She cleaned herself in the small, communal shower. Soap that didn’t smell good. Cheap, single-blade razors. Her rented room had no windows, so she walked the docks to pass the long, lonely afternoons. The daylight seemed foreign. At Charleston Beach Road she got on the railroad tracks and walked along the water.
She sensed the giant gray ships looming and blinked at the bright lights. She saw all the highway signs with the name of her hometown written on them in reflective white on green. But she did not go home. She waited in the wicked seaport and listened to the sounds of the naval shipyard on the breeze. She watched the steel ships for a sign that crowds of men with shaved heads had commandeered the vessels, made right what had been done wrong, and finally come to save her.
19
THE DANCE OF THE GHETTO
I wondered how long I would lie on the camping mat in the windy city. I did not sleep but had strange dreams. I stared numbly at the wall. I read my copy of Little House in the Big Woods for fifth-grade reading group. Diamond picked the book out, and I was supposed to make up questions. Diamond told me they had to be hard questions.
Outside, there were festivities in Lafayette Park. There was live music and young men reciting poetry. Children danced. Outside, there were messiahs and leaders and priestesses with wide eyes. The Black Panthers marched.
But inside there was dark. There was rest. There was a thin blanket that was my nest. There were coffee cups, books, heat, and quiet. I could hear the sirens and yelling through my walls—but inside I did not even have a phone.
The day before I was at Meadows crouched on the floor—that same gleaming, golden hardwood floor. The dust and the rat piss. I held on tightly to the six-year-old with dry, scaly patches of skin on his scalp. “It’s okay,” I whispered with my arms holding tight, rocking as his skinny hands searched for mine. The lights were off. It was black. We heard snuffles and scared murmurs. Tall, bossy Diamond huddled close beside me with giant tears running down her cheeks. I couldn’t hold them all.
Eighty-seven children had never been so quiet.
Eighty-seven children and one me. I wanted to put my arms around them all before they tried to scamper out the open door. I slammed it shut. I hoped the thick brick walls would protect us. I hoped the thick brick walls would grow and expand suddenly—to become miles in width—to save us all forever.
It was forty-five minutes until the police came. I pictured the men with guns running the halls—searching for me and my silent children. Every ghetto has its king. Each Cota Street has its own Jimmy James. We all paid homage in different ways. I didn’t want the young eyes to see the dead man splayed out on the concrete of the playground—his body filled with holes. Or the Caprice that sped away. The three quick shots in the afternoon. How the blood soaked into the hot blacktop.
<
br /> Trinise and Marvin were both sorry they had left me alone. They had their reasons.
Trinise: home with a sore throat. Marvin: a visit with Patrice.
I told the principal I was taking a few days off. He shrugged and nodded. He dusted his books with his back to me. “That’s fine, Ms. Vera. We will see you soon.” He didn’t expect me to come back.
I was eighty-seven years old that night in my bathtub. One year for each child who was caught in the crossfire. It was easy and simple to lie down in my bed. I swam through a thick fog. I escaped. I called for the Man from Angel Road in my dreams. I brushed against him in the night. But somehow, I could no longer remember his face. His voice was either screams or whispers.
When I came back I asked Trinise and Marvin if news reporters had come to Meadows after the shooting. They shrugged. I did not tell them how I disliked news reporters. And that I would escape them at all costs.
Trinise told me, “No one came here, Vera. They never do.”
20
BLACK ROCKS
Kat studied Annie’s diary carefully. She imagined love. She filled a notebook to replace the one she had given to Jimmy James. She submitted a poem to a literary journal. They sent her a check for twenty-five dollars and a copy of the magazine. Kat never cashed that check. She looked at her name in print often. The poem was on gray-purple paper and read:
Annie Kiss and Hot Rod Brady Robbins on the Sol Duc
It is hot, and her hair is that color. Her skin is tanned brown. She has swum in the river for 3 days. She has swayed on the sandy banks in the evening. She has let the cold glacier melt wash over her. She is 17. She holds a black rock to her cheek. She tells herself she will never go back there. To that place. To the cold trailer stink and artificial light.
Her hair is braided. Sun-bleached. She has not unbraided it. It has not been combed. For 3 days. She paddles to the river bend. The water flows faster there. It is blue, blue, blue, and deep. She turns over and floats back to him. He is 18. He watches her. He watches his dry fly float on the water. He watches her for longer.
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