“Spicey just be askin about Ray-Ray . . .” Deandra admitted.
“It’s fine, Dee,” Tiff said. She set down the glasses and untwisted the cap to the Sprite. The bottle hissed. Deandra reached over and said, “Here I’ll do it,” and took the bottle in her hand and started pouring everyone a glass.
Tiff looked up at Zorka. “Ray-Ray was my big brother, so . . .”
“I sorry, Tiff,” Zorka said. “I say to Dee, he look so super-fly, I am sad to hear.”
*
“Man, I remember how all the girls be crushin on Ray-Ray, that’s when Tiff was all skinny and didn’t even pay me no attention, ha – Tiff don’t even remember too! But I saw Tiff right away, my heart near damn burst open right then and there!”
Deandra looked over at Tiff. Tiff caught her eye and dipped her chin gently down, smiling privately to herself.
“I saw you . . .” Tiff said quietly.
“Nah, you didn’t, I was like acting up all the time in front of you and you ain’t even be turning your head—”
Tiff looked over and gave Deandra a self-conscious smile, then bit her lip and looked down as if she’d have a laugh, but just stayed smiling.
Deandra gave a proud one-sided grin and said, “Anyway . . .”
Her face was warm and drifting for a second. It floated over to the photo of Ray-Ray. Then when it landed she picked up her thought.
“He was gonna get a scholarship, like first Milwaukee public brother to get a full ride to an Ivy. Cause he was smart too. Keeping his grade up. Plus he was the only Freshman on Varsity and by the time he was a Junior – shit that boy could sprint that final stretch! There was this white kid, Jacob somethin, he clocked in at like eighteen minutes something, like 18:42 or something, for the 5,000 metres, at the Washington Park meet, right? Well Ray-Ray fuckin shaved that kid, broke the goddamn record PERIOD, 18:08 right? That’s the photo, it was in the papers, like front and center, with them big letters, “RAYMOND THOMSON, THE LIGHTNING BOLT”. We all be going to them track meets just for him, to see him run (well, ’cept for me, cuz I had my eye on Tiff, ha!), but yeah it was like magic, I mean he was like floating across, but his legs cutting through the air . . . But then he just drop dead. Right in front of all our eyes too. It was at Jackson Park, the one between Forest Home Avenue and Jackson Park Drive, and 43rd cuts it off on the West, you know which one I’m talking about? Anyway it was the two-mile run, and everyone was waiting around the intersection of 43rd and Forest Home and the flags were all set up and shit, and of course who do we see on that home stretch but Ray-Ray sprinting his last yards, like a bullet with his chest out and his legs slicing the air in front of him, he was coming towards us like the Goddamn-Messiah!”
“Don’t say that, Dee.”
“I’m sorry Tiff. But I’m serious, Spicey, that boy was like holy when he be running, you could feel it.”
Deandra looked over at Tiff.
“Anyway, maybe I shouldn’t be running my mouth ’bout it.”
“No, it’s fine. I mean she wanna know.”
“What happen?” Zorka asked, swallowing her Sprite.
“. . . Nobody knows,” Deandra picked up. “Like even those smart-ass doctors at that Mount Sinai Hospital couldn’t figure it out. Ray-Ray just grabbed his side, hunched down and collapsed. Then he wasn’t moving. Coach ran up and he was like pushing everyone away and the other runners kept coming in and some ran around him and others stopped cause no one knew what was going on, and Coach was saying to Tiff and her granny, “It’s gonna be ok, just give him some space.” But he ain’t movin! Give him some space, he kept shouting. Then the ambulance came and they were shouting for everyone to BACK UP, and they got out that machine with the wires, and cut his shirt open and taped them wire-ends on his chest and stomach and they were shouting CLEAR, and Ray-Ray’s chest jump up, as if he wanted to get up and run, but then it fell back to the ground, and Tiff ’s granny was getting in a fight with Coach and one of them ambulance men, cause they was pushing her away, and she kept saying THAT’S MY BOY THAT’S MY BABY BOY—And . . .”
Deandra glanced over at Tiff and stopped.
“I’m sorry, Tiff. I didn’t mean to get into it like that. I’m sorry . . .”
“It’s fine, Dee. Yeah, Ray-Ray was real special. Not just cause he was my brother, but I mean for the community too. Everyone was like, well Ray-Ray can do it . . . don’t matter what . . . You know? Made everyone feel like, we can achieve whatever we want, and like if you be working for it, like reading and doing your homework, then training and practising, you gonna get it, that’s how it was. It’s like what they say at Church be all riding on Ray-Ray, cause he made it happen like that.”
“But why you not study and practise like Ray-Ray and get big scholarship too?” Zorka asked.
“Nah, see here’s where you don’t get it, Spicey.” Deandra stood up and walked to the window. Then she turned around, “. . . cause you ain’t black and you ain’t even American, so you way off if you think I’m just gonna read those white-ass academics, and white-wash my goddamn brain so I can get a fuckin C+ in their history class where we be learning ’bout our Presidents and the Louisiana Purchase and the Great Depression and shit, but ain’t nobody gonna talk ’bout what the fuck their white asses did to my people . . . And ain’t they real content with themselves, hoardin us into section 8 housing and detention centers, ‘keeping the streets safe’, whitefolk all ‘Tough on Crime’ but they just guilty as fuck about history, stashin us away so no one sees what they done.”
“Dee, relax, she just asking . . . she don’t know,” Tiff said, walking over to Deandra.
Deandra took a step back and turned towards Zorka.
“Like seriously, I don’t know what kind of fucked up shit went on in your country or whatever, and I’m sorry ’bout that too, but shit’s real here. Like it’s not history, it’s now.”
Zorka was looking into Deandra’s soft, round eyes, willed and faithful.
“History is now,” Zorka repeated.
*
After Raymond’s funeral, Tiff ’s grandmother would open her prayer book and sit by the window as usual, except Tiff could see by her mouth that she wasn’t reciting the prayers or reading from the Bible. She was just mouthing to the clouds, “Give him back.”
*
“Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
*
Deandra hated it when things got too serious. She’d always pull up her tracksuit bottoms and let out a laugh.
She kicked Zorka on the ankle with a smile.
“Besides, ain’t you supposed to be a dyke anyway?”
“Come on, Dee, don’t use that word,” Tiff said.
“I’m just playing, I mean ain’t none of my business if you into girls, unless you got a problem with it, then it’s my business, but – I mean, come on, girl, what’s up with your hair?”
“It’s no good?” Zorka asked touching her hair.
“You got like a mullet thing going on . . .”
“This is dyke hair?” Zorka asked.
Both Tiff and Deandra burst out laughing, covering their mouths and bending over to their knees.
Finally, when the laughter subsided, Deandra spoke.
“Nah, it’s cool, girl. Keep your hair like that. But everyone gonna be thinking you into girls, that’s all. Are you?”
Zorka thought about it.
“Yeah,” she answered.
*
“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
*
Tammie had an old student of hers who was now the manager at the Marcus Southgate Cinema on 30th Street, so she pulled a few strings and got Zorka a job there on the weekends, switching between collecting tickets and indicating the direction of Theatre 1 or Theatre 2, or working behin
d the concession stand, asking customers if they would like sweet or salty popcorn, or a combination of the two, and if they’d like to save fifty cents by getting the menu with the large Pepsi.
At first Zorka was embarrassed and tried to make fun of her job to Deandra and Tiff, but Deandra sang out “She work harrrrd for the money, so haaaard for it honey!” and Tiff said, “You get to see some films for free then?”
Zorka snuck in Dee and Tiff whenever they wanted to see a film, and always gave them the large sweet-and-salty popcorn and two Sprites “on the house”.
Tiff told Zorka that if she really didn’t like her job she could ask her granny if they were looking for anyone to help out part time with the cleaning in the building where she’d worked as a custodian.
*
When the manager caught on to Zorka’s favours, he pulled her aside and told her that he didn’t want to have to call the police about this.
“Bout what?” Zorka said.
“About you getting your friends into the cinema for free to do drugs.”
“They don’t do drug, they just watch film . . .”
“Alright listen, I’m doing this as a favour to Tammie . . .”
“Why?” Zorka snuffed. “You fuckin her behind my uncle’s back?”
*
The police brought up Zorka’s alien status and hinted that she was still a guest in this country and should behave accordingly, otherwise she’d risk deportation.
*
When Zorka came by the cinema that summer, they already had some blonde chick working the cash register – Zorka recognised her from the bus stop. Just when Zorka was gearing up to make fun of her goody-good look, Deandra pointed discretely in her direction and said to Zorka:
“She a dyke too, by the way.”
Zorka looked her over carefully.
“Oooo, you like her, don’t you,” Deandra continued.
“No, she is simple looking.”
“Nah, girl, you totally crushin on that Mickey Mouse club over there.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m a go over there and tell her that you wanna get with that.”
Zorka pulled on Deandra’s T-shirt, whispering, “Stop, I kill you, Dee, I swear! I do not like her, I just looking.”
Deandra stepped back and Zorka let go and Deandra began smoothing out her T-shirt.
“Damn, girl, why you stretch out my shirt like that. Whatever I don’t need to play no Mickey Mouse matchmaker for nobody.” She shrugged her shoulders so that her T-shirt would fall right again.
“But she is kinda cute tho.”
*
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together . . . intricately woven in the depths of the earth . . .”
*
A couple of months before graduation, Zorka decided she needed a new look. She went to Good Will and bought herself a tight pair of black jeans, a tight black T-shirt and a men’s leather jacket. In the end she looked like a rock ’n’ roll scarecrow. She didn’t want to layer up her skinny body, she wanted to show it off now, like a blade. She spotted a used push-up bra with the black lace on each cup bunched and fraying. It was seventy-five cents. She bought it. For the first time, she felt that her breasts rose out of her shirt, like two knuckled fists.
Then she snuck Gejza’s electric razor and shaved her head.
*
There were black buckets of flowers outside of the Pick ’N Save grocery store, so she pulled a thin bouquet of soft pink roses wrapped in clear plastic and a magenta ribbon and walked off.
The Union Cemetery was between North 20th and Teutonia Avenue.
She crossed the street into an open plain of grass, with graves spotted throughout the green like handfuls of stones thrown upon the earth. As she walked uphill, the tombstones were arranged with more disciplined intent, in rows, by twos, no longer slightly crooked, but upright and all looking in the same direction. Tall cedar trees and ash trees covered the graves with netting shadows. Zorka spotted an old woman carrying a dark blue bucket uphill with a grey German Shepherd walking behind her.
“Excuse me!” Zorka shouted at her.
The woman turned around and set the bucket down, the dog stopped at her side. She put a hand up to her brow to cover the sunlight and peered out at Zorka.
“How I find a grave, please?” Zorka shouted, her voice curving up, trying to be as polite as she could shape it to be.
The wind blew a piece of the old woman’s hair out of her bun and the white strands flailed at her ear. The woman lowered her hand, picked up her bucket, made her way downhill towards Zorka, the brown and grey dog walking at her shadow.
“Well, it depends which grave you’re looking for . . .” the old woman said.
“My brother,” Zorka replied without thinking.
“Oh I’m sorry, sweetheart. What was your brother’s name?”
“Ray-Ray. I mean, Raymond Thomson.”
The woman looked at the pink roses then up at Zorka’s shaved head.
“Sure, I remember him. The runner. Nice boy . . .”
“He was super fly,” Zorka said, nodding solemnly downwards.
“You’re his sister?” the woman asked with a slight squint.
Zorka shrugged.
*
Zorka got Tiff a necklace she stole from Claire’s and Deandra a Tommy Hilfiger leather wallet she pulled from the Burlington Coat Factory in Brown Deer and placed a twenty into it. She wrapped the presents and took the 14 bus, got off in front of the Taqueria, and walked to the grey and red building on the corner of Lapham, pulled hard on the glass door that jammed, then stuffed the package into Tiff ’s granny’s mailbox.
*
“Leaving? I’m sorry but that’s the dumbest shit I ever heard. Wait till you graduate at least!” Deandra said.
“I do not wanna graduate.”
“Come on, Z! You ain’t dumb, I know it, so why you playing it like that?”
But Zorka didn’t answer. Instead, she sniffed loud.
“Shit, Dee,” she mumbled. Then the tears began to form in her eyes.
*
Zorka hummed a tune as she walked, the meaning distant from the melody, the melody a glaze down her throat.
It was like music for a silent film, where a woman turns the corner and the light dilates and we see with her eyes what will become love at first sight. Except this was music for a silent world, where a woman walks onto the stage and the sky dilates and we see with her eyes what will become—
Czechoslovak Radio, Wednesday November 22nd: Wenceslas Square, 12 o’clock and 10 minutes. It’s hard to guess how many people are here, tens of thousands of citizens. They’re expressing their longing for democratic changes in our society. The singer Marta Kubišová, who had been banned from appearing in public for nearly twenty years, will sing her best-loved song, “A Prayer for Marta”.
The singer sang her prayer acapella, give us back our peace, give us back our governance, give us back our decency . . . her voice expanding into the hollow between the mass of heads and the sky.
*
Radio Prague: Can you remember how people reacted when they heard the song?
MK: I was very high above those people, but friends told me that all the people were crying and pointing upwards.
*
Green duffle bag in hand, the one Tammie had got her in the hope that she’d join the soccer team, Zorka raided her uncle and aunt’s money cache, a coral-coloured fanny-pack tucked in the back of a sock drawer.
*
It was only when the bus crossed the state line that the murmur of memories created a soreness of unidentified longing, like for Ray-Ray with his holy lungs, running through the woods. She pushed her teeth together and smeared her face with her palms, then turned completely to the window and watched the pines passing in rows.
*
She had spun Tammie’s globe one last time before leaving. She placed her index finger on the spinning surface like a needle to a turning record and l
istened to her nail run across the grooves of continents.
*
“Tell Tammie, I’m going to call the cops myself and get that girl deported.”
“Marja, you’re no longer her legal guardian, she’s eighteen.”
*
On the Amtrak train to Pittsburgh, a man wearing a dark business suit sat across from Zorka, looking at her suspiciously.
“What?” she said straight at him.
“. . . How old are you . . . ?” he asked.
Zorka unzipped her jacket and squeezed her cushioned tits.
“I’m a porn star,” she said, then zipped her jacket back up.
The man went back to reading the paper, as Zorka continued to stare full-force at his forehead until he folded up the pages, put the newspaper in his briefcase, got up and switched seats.
From Pittsburgh she kept going east, one train then another. In the stations, she studied the railway map, brushed her teeth in the toilet, paced about the halls, eyeing around for predators, then slept in the plastic chairs, curled up over her duffle bag.
*
The train pulled into South Station in Boston and she decided to stay a moment and have a look around the city. She got onto Summer Street and walked straight towards the flow of water. The river was curling beneath the arches of the bridge and cresting out, towards the tree-lined banks, glimmering at the sheer skyscraper with its reflective windows absorbing the sky above.
Zorka watched the water’s surface unable to rush itself as much as the current insisted, folding into its own burden, and thought of Jana. That serious girl with the puddle-coloured hair and slate-grey eyes. She picked up a pebble and chucked it over the bridge into the river.
“Agnes Dei and the Jans!” she screamed and pinched some air-guitar chords at her gut.
It began to drizzle.
*
Zorka stopped by a 7-Eleven to get a bottle of Sprite and some of those spicy Cheetos she liked even though they turned her fingertips neon orange. The guy at the register was looking at her. She clocked him a couple times, putting his features together in her head. Short brown hair with a side parting, the front slightly flipped up, his two eyes curved down towards his big ears, just in line with his long, beakish nose, thin lips shaded by a bit of stubble . . .
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