Her pink towel is drying on Japanese knotweed. She pulls it down, shakes it clean, lays it on the bank, studies the snag pile of uprooted trees, and sleeps.
Eventually, he reels in, leaves the fish on a stringer in the cold water. He goes to her, stands close, his drips wake her.
He does not say he loves her. But he sits at her back, unleashes her hair from the barrettes, and combs it tame.
In her notebook, Kat wrote, feeling an anxious dripping sensation in her stomach—an ulcer that burned. In her apartment there were no river rocks. No trees. There was not a gentle, golden hand tugging at stubborn childish braids. There was no brown hair. She lay in her small bed and tried to sleep. But there was no rest. She finally dreamed of things other than Jimmy James. And the nightmares—she ran from them in her sleep. Kicking and screaming. She clawed at them. She kicked her blanket to the floor. She scraped the wall at her head. Bruises colored pale skin. She lay on her back and remembered things. She wanted to tell Annie Kiss, You can’t be like other people. There was a water stain on Kat’s ceiling in the shape of praying hands. There was a trail across her floor that she walked when she could not sleep. When she paced, the sound of her footsteps echoed. Slowly, inside those four walls, she withered. Her sad mind concocted a disturbed plan. If there was no room for her back in David, she would make room. It was a stupid idea. But Kat was young. And life had made very few promises to her.
She waited for the night when Annie came to her door in angry tears. Annie didn’t know anyone else in town. Her presence and her trouble were like a beautiful gift. Kat knew Annie was too proud to stay on at the clubs. Brady and Jimmy James had tricked her into thinking she was better (the fools). Annie had surely talked back to the owners. Sauced them. Not gone to their parties. Set a bad example for the other girls. The saggy skin of her belly hung angrily. A new tattoo slashed across her left shoulder blade. No cute baby. Annie a junkie. Kat smiled to herself. Annie had old stretch marks on her belly. Kat herself had helped cover them with makeup before she went on stage.
“I’m sick, Kat,” Annie said to her in the doorway of Kat’s room. Annie was faint and hollow. Sick. Annie had a black eye, a bloody nose. “I got fired,” she explained. Bloody gravel stuck to her thigh from being drug through the alley. “I need your help,” she pleaded. “I’m tired of all this. I wanna go back to David. Will you call Brady?”
“I’ll help you,” Kat told her after a long moment. She picked up a dingy yellow washcloth from her kitchen counter. Closed Annie’s fingers around it. Held it under Annie’s bleeding nose. Kat spoke in short sentences. “You stay here. I’ll be back. Wait on my bed.” Kat shut the door behind her without locking it. Annie stared at the washcloth. Rubbed tenderly at her face. She crumpled on Kat’s bed and watched the yellow cloth turn bright red. She was eighteen.
Kat ran down the hall and up one flight of stairs. Knocked at a door. Got everything she needed. They were used to her there. She bought for her customers often. They fronted her what she asked for and she came back down to her apartment with her pockets full.
Annie was so sick Kat had to shoot her up herself. She’d done it before—different elbows and skins. She was good at finding veins in unlikely places. Peering intently. Poking and prodding. Annie protested at first. “No more!” she wailed. She wanted to clean up bad—wanted it more than Kat had ever seen. Kat shook her head. Pride again. It would be Annie’s downfall.
Kat reasoned with her firmly, “It’s bad for you to go cold turkey. It’s too hard on your body. I’ll just give you a little bit so you aren’t sick. You need methadone.” A spot of blood appeared where she slid the needle out. She put a piece of cheap toilet paper on the tiny wound. The blood seeped onto the tissue and stained it red. She put it in her pocket. Annie’s eyes rolled back into her head. She’d given her more than a little bit. A pool of urine darkened the blanket beneath her. Annie was flailing and groggy and sick and out of control. Kat carefully pulled the washcloth out of Annie’s hand. She put it in her pocket next to the bloody tissue paper. Closed the door to her apartment and went out to the street. She walked to the end of the block and used the pay phone to call Brady. The sea wind brought the scent of dead marine life. She had the phone number memorized.
It was an important day. The day the Man from Angel Road borrowed Fitz’s Honda to drive to Bremerton. He listened to the CD player—Mark Lanegan sang about shooting little Sadie down. He wore fourteen-eye oxblood boots and black Levi’s, a black flight jacket and a black skullcap. He was in a good mood. He didn’t mind being tired the next day. He was going hunting with me in the morning. But he could sleep all afternoon. It was only ten dollars in gas to drive to the navy base in the little Japanese car. He had accomplished quite a few things in Seattle that day. He took the ferry back to Bremerton to meet with some friends and change his clothes.
Brady told Kat he was on his way to work. He’d been on graveyard for six months now. He told Kat where Jimmy James was. Brady was tired and not thinking too clearly. “Catch a ride back to David with him. Call me at work if you need me. I’ll be home in the morning. I’ll leave the back door unlocked.” Brady was in danger of losing his job. He’d taken too much time off already. He was sleepy—had been working overtime—eleven straight weeks—twelve-hour shifts—an hour commute each way. No weekends. His bed was lumpy and caving in. The extra money he earned would put him in a different tax bracket. He lost most of it. He worked the overtime to keep his job.
Kat trotted contentedly down the intermittently lit street. She smiled smugly. Her room was still unlocked. She didn’t worry about anybody coming in and hurting woozy, vulnerable Annie Kiss. She cut through an alley. She moved closer to the Man from Angel Road. She knew exactly where he was. She knew exactly who he was with. Duane told her about friends and enemies. How you had to keep your friends close. And your enemies closer. She ran past the docks and through the mist. She pounced on a fallen quarter that gleamed in a streetlight.
She burst into the concert house on a mission. It took quite a while to talk Jimmy James into the alley where he could hear her words. He stood reluctantly while she talked. He sighed and thought it over. He said good-bye to his friends without explaining.
The drive back to David was silent. Kat was content in the backseat holding Annie’s head in her lap. Jimmy James pretended that he was alone. When they got to Brady’s he carried Annie into the bedroom. When he came back to the car Kat was gone. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. He went back into the trailer and crouched down next to Annie’s head. He talked softly and rapped at her temple.
“Annie? You still in there?”
She smiled in spite of herself and pushed his finger away. “Fuck off! Go bother Vivi and let me die here, alone, thank you.” She buried her face in the pillow.
“You know, Ms. Kiss, I think you will live,” Jimmy James answered. He took a bottle of sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet and set them on the nightstand. He gave her a glass of water. “You’ll need these,” he said. After hesitating, he took the .45 from underneath the pillow on Brady’s side of the bed. He took the ammunition from the top shelf of the closet and sat down to load the gun. He pushed each bullet in tenderly. “Just in case,” he told Annie. “This will be here. Underneath the mattress on your side. Got it?”
She moaned unintelligibly.
He told her Brady would be there soon and shoved the gun under the mattress. “It’s loaded, okay?” He nudged her.
“Oh-kay!” She glared at him and sweated. Then she sighed. “Thanks.” Tears pooled in her eyes. “I’ll see you guys when I feel better. Send Ms. Violet my best regards.”
He nodded and strode away. Annie heard him lock the front door and then the sound of his truck rumble to life out front. When all was silent she could have sworn she heard a strange cry and something scratching at the door. She swallowed sleeping pills and lay back on the pillow—exhausted.
The spot of Annie’s blood that was on the toilet paper in K
at’s pocket was bright red. The blood on the washcloth next to it was darker—mixed with sparkly makeup and little bits of tar.
The blood that dripped onto the gravel much later that night was shady against the black rocks. A few spots splattered against an old fence post. After a while it turned darker—closer to black. It matched Jimmy James’s boots more closely.
PART 3
21
HAIR
My hair was blond and snarled easily. Each strand was fine but it grew thickly over my scalp. It was so straight it did not hold curls. It unrolled from hot curling irons and lay limp. The little girls at Meadows asked to touch it—to put their hands tentatively on the smooth strands of gold. They told me they had never felt anything like it. They asked me why on earth I didn’t grow it longer. They told me if they had hair like mine, they would grow it down to their toes.
Diamond named its color cornsilk.
I told them that my best friend Annie’s hair had been very long, and it swallowed her like a warm robe made from shiny animal fur. I explained how it had danced upon her shrugging shoulders—how men had stared at it, and baby’s fingers had reached toward the shiny piles of brown with greed and adoration. I told them there was nothing Annie could have done about the attention—it was her mother’s hair.
The rising heat and humidity was not good for Diamond’s perm—it was growing out.
The ends of her hair were breaking off. Nelly was on tour and sang about “cornrows and manicured toes”—things you were more likely to see in the suburbs unless you had a nice auntie who would do it for free. But Diamond lived at the orphanage six blocks away. She had hair that stood up on end. It became fuzzy. She could not grease it down. She tried vainly but it would not flatten. Her hair was fried and angry—it stood for a struggle she felt in her bones. Always.
Always would her hair betray her. It split from her head in squirming strands. In retaliation, she set her back ramrod straight. With her shoulders steady. And stared at the other children in the homework lab until they looked down in shame—grazing over the parts of her that were breaking.
Diamond was an expert in a certain type of knowledge—her brain stored information that wouldn’t get her a high SAT score. She possessed survival skills. She knew how to hide from a repo man. She watched the ladies who ran the orphanage pinch and pull and save and barter and get food and clothes when there were none. Diamond knew how to talk. She was strong. Even when it didn’t look good. Even when nothing made sense. She looked around her with shrewd eyeballs that already had the power to terrify grown men. She weighed and calculated. She learned at a young age that sometimes the board games at the orphanage had missing pieces. And so the children made up new rules to make do. But the new rules applied only to the games at the orphanage. And outside of those rusty gates was a different world. A world where those rules couldn’t win. And in that world, Diamond’s eyes couldn’t save her from harm.
She watched the football game impassively during the after-school program. During slow parts she scribbled in a notebook. She sniffed when one of the fifth graders cried fat tears after the boys from the county with matching uniforms beat Meadows fifty-three to zero. The home team didn’t walk with their usual cockiness the next day, or the day after. They tasted a cold, bitter envy at the back of their throats. Diamond tore the page from her notebook and shoved it at me on her way out. It was a poem called “My Hair Is Normal.” She gave it to me without a word or a sideways glance. Her nose ring sparkled defiantly. Her arms were certain. She wrote the poem even though there had been no assignments due.
I remembered that small children are capable of great defiance. Defiance that overwhelms. Defiance that changes small worlds completely. Dangerous feelings that blot out everything.
From that point on Diamond wrote. She gave me so many poems I kept a box of them. I told her we would make a book. Diamond wrote a poem, “Cadillac,” about how fancy cars rarely crossed the lines onto the crumbling blacktop streets of her neighborhood. And “The County” about how when Suburbans did come, it was for three reasons: There were guns for sale. There were drugs stashed. There were sad, pretty ladies who had seen the hardest of hard times. She wrote a fiction piece in which simultaneously a woman with fake nails drank a martini in Soulard, a teenager in tight jeans swallowed OxyContin in rural Illinois, and a housewife from Washington County donated hand-knitted socks to Diamond’s orphanage. She wrote and she wrote and she wrote. I kept all the papers carefully flattened and stashed away. We edited and rewrote. I asked Diamond what she wanted to name her book. “My Hair,” she told me sternly.
The strength of the Northside waned and then flickered. A strange sickness seemed to linger there. The winter waned. I watched the pages of typed text flap in the wind outside the free clinic on Vandeventer Avenue—the names of all the people who tested positive for HIV.
Summer came quickly to the collapsing brick and blacktop.
The sunshine cooked us in our hot-oven schoolhouse. I sweated and grew apathetic. The air was hard to breathe. My lungs ached each morning. A fourth grader at the orphanage died from an asthma attack—Diamond’s best friend. Her stony face creased in sadness when she asked me, “Why we always dyin’, Ms. Vera?”
I looked out the window at the oak trees and the street in the front of the school. Green leaves waved lightly in the sodden air. Winter was suddenly over. My tongue screamed for cold, clean, unchlorinated water. Unpolluted air. Diamond read out loud in Mrs. Halls’s class. She was tongue-tied and stumbling. The words in the book seemed foreign in her mouth. Even Mrs. Halls was sweating.
She told Diamond, “Thank you.” Then smiled.
From under her desk she brought out a bright red cooler. Inside were carefully cut-up pieces of chilled fruit. I saw the children’s shining eyes. I heard their contented sighs. The vitamin C was just what they needed. It was little things like cold fruit that saved the world.
Mrs. Halls let them talk as they ate. I took a strawberry and a slice of pineapple and said, “Thank you.” I graded papers slowly.
Diamond chewed on apple slices and stared out the open window. Her hair was a perfect halo. I looked where her eyes were trained in interest. A 1967 Mercury Cougar with a rattle-can red-and-gray paint job and a dented hood was parked with one and a half wheels on the curb.
I blinked at the lines on the steel body. The vision hit me like a cinder block to the side of the head. My jaw dropped. I moved to sit next to her and stare.
Diamond’s gaze drifted toward the burned-down buildings behind the car and Mirabella dancing on Sullivan, then finally to Mrs. Halls who stood in front of the classroom and talked about the field trip to Meramec River on Friday. Diamond passed me a note. On it was written That’s my daddy’s car!
Mrs. Halls showed pictures of rose mallow and buttonbush. She played a tape recording of bird calls: rails, bitterns, and moorhens. She talked about wetlands and prairies and how St. Louis was also called Mound City. I looked at her overhead pictures of mounds covered in wildflowers. Two foolish tears pooled in my eyes.
I took out colored pencils and my sketchbook. I hurried to draw the Mercury Cougar on the street before it drove away. My initial crude pencil lines elaborated into a colorful scene: A crème-colored ’67 Merc and a wild-girl driver. A cigarette dangling from fine fingertips. Sunglasses riding a pretty nose. Red lips smirking.
At the center of the scene was the thickest brown hair there ever was. It glinted in summer light. The wind from the rolled-down windows held it up for the mere pleasure of touching it.
Diamond looked over and nudged me. She whispered excitedly, “I want it on the cover! Can I use it please, Ms. Vera?!” Mrs. Halls glared at us both. I nodded and shushed Diamond with eyes that warned, and she turned back around eagerly. I added a passenger to the car: a young girl with old eyes. A pretty girl with skinny arms and a strong chin—hair that was normal. When Diamond was brave enough to look again her face broke into a rare smile. Her back quivered in ecst
asy. She scribbled a note on the smallest corner of paper and passed it to me with warm hands. THANK YOU!!! was written on it in red marker. Mrs. Halls noticed. She shook her head exasperatedly.
There was no tombstone or memorial for Annie Kiss. But there was a colored pencil drawing on the cover of a self-published book. There was an imaginary ride where two strong girls explored a red desert dotted with giant saguaros and purple prickly pear. They headed toward a hill covered with paloverde and acacia. It was a wet spring. The cactus bloomed.
That night, I attached Diamond’s typed and edited poems together. I put a color copy of my drawing on the hard cover. I signed the colored-pencil drawing and placed it in a frame for her.
I thought about all my other drawings and paintings—how they were probably gone now.
I didn’t know where. I sat on the camping mat, smoking, and did not sleep.
22
JUNK
I saw Annie’s Cougar in the junkyard two days before I left for St. Louis. It was early in the morning. I’d been wandering all night. I came to the junkyard two hours before it opened. But through the fence I saw the Cougar between an Econoline and a one-ton truck. A coil of rusted chains sat above the driver’s-side window. They bled from the rain. Rivulets of oxidized red slid down the body and collected along the fenders. But I knew it was Annie’s because the paint job was one of a kind.
The car was wrecked—the beautiful, rosy-beige paint crinkled and split where the steel was bent. The skilled welding was wasted. Its hood yawned open and exposed its nearly empty contents—a skeleton of a belly with no engine. A few hoses and cut fuel lines was all that was left of the carefully rebuilt 289. The radiator was disconnected along with the motor. It sat sadly in the empty cavity under the hood.
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