Milk Blood Heat Page 4

  Finally, he says, Why can’t you stop? and Zey guesses at what he means—being changed, being bad. She twines her fingers into the soft mat of his hair. There’s nothing she can tell him that he’d understand, that might bring comfort. It is the nature of light to illuminate, and she can’t, like so many, forget what she’s seen. She wishes this moment of connection was enough, but Duck’s waiting and she has to speak. Truth is beautiful, she tells her brother, quoting Emerson, but so are lies.

  Duck now understands the word possessed and tells his two best friends at school he thinks this is what his sister is. He describes how she lies on the floor of her room with her legs straight up against the wall, how that peculiar sound she makes glows in the air around her head like the letter ‘S’ come to life. He tells them how Pastor pulled him aside last Sunday and told him the devil came in many forms, but most shaped like women.

  They are his best friends, but he is not theirs. His friends tell other friends until the word breaks out, and suddenly, Rylan stands before him on the playground, fresh-cut fade, fat lips sneering, his father’s gold chains around his neck. His big hands hang loose as if just passing the time, the knuckles cracked and dry. He’s in Duck’s grade but held back—almost fourteen, dumb in his anger at all these smaller boys who belong.

  I heard your sister’s on some Exorcist shit, he says. Head spinning around and shit. Duck mumbles, tries to move around him, but Rylan puts a solid hand on his chest. Think that bitch can spin like that on my dick?

  The playground erupts, Duck’s classmates pouring one out for his defeat. Duck knows that, next to an insult to his mother, this is the worst a boy can say. He knows he can’t allow this to slide, not here with all the other boys listening. He knows before he steps forward that he’ll lose. But he does it anyway.

  When her brother comes home from school, Zey, reading on the front steps, stops him at the door before she loses him to her parents’ watch. She grabs his chin, makes him look her in the face. What happened? she asks. His cheek is already swelling, blood pooling underneath the skin. His eyes are dark on hers. They’re calling you devil-bitch at school, Duck says, and Zey’s head rears back; it’s the first time she’s ever heard her brother cuss. They say you’re going to Hell.

  Who says that? she asks. He says, Rylan and them. And Pastor. He pulls away from her, looks at her hard until she falls back and lets him pass into the house. Their mother fusses over him as she holds a bag of frozen peas to the bruises on his face. What happened, she demands, and Duck, ever loyal, tells them of the fight but not the reason. Their mother picks up the phone to call the principal, but their father hangs it up. Don’t shame him, he says and chucks her brother beneath his chin. I’m sure the other boy looks worse. He winks.

  Zey sneaks out easily, once her parents are asleep. Though it’s dangerous for a girl to travel this way, she likes how a street can feel at night, clean, almost like she owns it. Occasionally she looks into the quiet sky, her eyes drawn to the brightest lights, and remembers how once in Science her teacher taught the class to tell the difference between stars and planets. Think about “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” he’d said. Mercury, Venus, Mars—the planets never flickered.

  She arrives at New Life First Baptist some quick blocks later. In the dark, the small, steepled church looks exactly as it is: hollow, misleading. A stage. She knows the stories Pastor tells are ones he’s learned from other men, passed through generations like a plague until they become mentality, these adopted laws from a blue-eyed, man-dreamt Heaven. She thinks she knows who Ms. Addler’s “they” is, and what they hoped she’d never learn: that she is not second, not of Adam’s rib; that her whole being is God; that Pastor and those like him will continue to shout from the pulpit, raising boys—her Duck—to be hateful and scared.

  Zey unscrews the cap of her father’s red canister and breathes deep. She’s always liked the smell of gasoline—when she was a kid, her father used to let her work the pump. She likes the scent of something that can burn. She douses the outsized wooden doors and steps back. Thinks for a moment of the headlines tomorrow: black girl burns down black church, and the ways in which this act will be misread; how all the white folks—some black ones too—will be so thrilled for an excuse to talk about self-perpetuated crime. She hesitates one more moment, and then she strikes the match.

  Don’t.

  Zey turns to find Duck standing defiant behind her. He’s in his pajamas, one eye a shiny black moon, the other swollen shut. He and Zey stand off, the match still glowing in her hand, the possibility of inferno heavy around them. Duck moves forward and takes her empty hand, and Zey lets the flame fizzle out.

  On Friday Zey fakes sick, coughing into her palm, and her parents, tired of fighting, barely question her. You’ve made your bed, her mother says. Once the house is empty, Zey gets dressed, goes into the kitchen and spreads two slices of bread thick with peanut butter and apple jelly. She knows that soon she’ll walk through the door of eighteen, pass through her parents’ house into something she can’t quite see but can sense the murky edges of—the shape of her future. She will pack all her knowledge, strings of inky words—pansophy, verisimilitude—into canvas bags and wear them on her womanly body, where they’ll glow like Tahitian pearl, and when she leaves, her parents will wash their hands of her. Duck will send letters only once or twice a year. He will pen his love on cardstock; he will ask her how she is, but never when she’s coming back. Zey will remember Ms. Addler, and make a point to study her own power, to see the shadows beneath other people’s speech. She’ll remember Pastor, and his fear. At times she’ll regret not having burned the church down, but she won’t deny her brother saved her.

  Zey puts the PB&J and a bag of baby carrots into a brown paper sack. She walks to her brother’s school and when she enters the main rotunda, it’s as if time has reversed. Everything’s the same as when she was here—the jungle murals on the walls, the slack-faced administrators. All the places one could count on to hide. In the dean’s office she is all dimples and smiles. She makes small chat with the woman at the desk, who’s been talking to middle schoolers all morning and is grateful for the break. My brother forgot his lunch, Zey tells her. Sweet sister, the woman says. What’s your brother’s name?

  Rylan, Zey says, and the woman looks up the classroom, tells her she’ll page him to meet her on the way. She starts to tell Zey how to get there, but Zey laughs. I remember, she says.

  Out of sight of the woman, Zey drops the lunch sack into the trash, and when she sees Rylan coming toward her—chubby, swaggering—her smile deepens. The boy stops short and stutter-steps, as if about to break and run, before facing her and planting his feet. She asks him, Do you know who I am?

  He jams his hands into his pockets and juts his chin. Yeah, so? What you want?

  Zey drops one hip, lets him see her teeth. What I hear, you’ve got something for me. She knows what she looks like to this boy, frizzy bangs falling into her eyes, skin au lait—she is Venusian, Aphrodite fresh from the sea. Rylan looks over his shoulder, tongue working inside his cheek. A student on hall pass exits a nearby classroom, but otherwise, they’re alone. Zey can guess his dilemma, his ego warring with his common sense. She sees where she should push. You scared?

  Rylan kicks at the ground, and when he speaks his voice is a studied growl, the much lower register of an act. He tells her, I ain’t scared of nothing.

  Then come on, she says.

  He follows her into a supply closet she remembers from her time here, where students kept their science projects, their volcanoes and model suns. It’s dim inside, and smells of glue and something spilt. Zey pushes the boy up against one of the shelves, spits on her palm, and slides her hand inside his pants. He is hard then soft then hard again, and caught up, stays that way. His unwashed smell joins the other scents; his sigh is sticky against her cheek.

  Zey lets him enjoy this a little, her hand slicking s
low. And just when the boy thinks this is going to be something else—further clout with his playground friends, fresh material to use beneath the sheets that night—Zey’s hand clamps around him. Don’t move, she whispers into his ear, and the boy goes rigid. Zey squeezes a little harder and stares him in the eyes.

  She says, Next time you fuck with my brother, I’ll find you where you sleep and rip it off. There are no shadows under Zey’s words, nothing hidden, and in that openness, the boy opens too, his fear escaping bravado and legacy to surface on his face. Zey studies it; she savors its plainness. So you understand? she says and the boy nods, because even in the dark she’s incandescent.

  The Loss of Heaven

  He weighed 210 pounds buck-ass naked; 217 in his leather jacket and boots, which he wore that crisp March evening to the bar along with a gold stud pin in his lapel. It was shaped like a spade, a gift from his wife when they were young, once she’d discovered how much he liked expensive-looking things. He wasn’t handsome but his light skin, wavy hair, the polished gleam of his fingernails, and the bills pressed tightly in his wallet almost made him so. As he entered the Albatross he stopped just in the doorway, imagining his body filling the width of the frame, giving the occupants time to look and wonder who he was. The jukebox played the Temptations and threw colored light onto his face, and a couple of women at a nearby table glanced up from their pastel martinis, one sucking the cherry from her drink. Satisfied, he walked in. Hilda swept a dishtowel along the bar top, looking bored, smiling out from under her bangs at a trio of men at the counter, a pretty laugh spilling from deep within her chest. He chose a stool in the middle, with an unobstructed view of her.

  “Hey there, Fred. Jim and Coke?” she asked, the start to their ritual. Her low, drawling voice pulled something tight inside his stomach.

  “You know it, kid,” he said. He slid his jacket off and draped it on the back of his chair as she filled a rocks glass with three large cubes of ice, so big they could sit in a drink a while before melting. In the few months since he’d met her, Fred often imagined tracing one down the contours of Hilda’s spine, recording an exact ratio of body heat and melting points.

  “No lime,” Hilda sang, placing his drink in front of him on a square of white napkin she’d sprinkled with salt. “Start a tab?”

  “I’ll pay as I go,” Fred told her, as he always did, and placed a five on the bar. Hilda disappeared the bill into her apron in one discreet, fluid motion. She never brought him change.

  The Albatross hosted a quiet crowd on Tuesday evenings, a mix of suits, day laborers, and truckers with three-day scruff. The bar’s aesthetic lingered somewhere between a dive and a lounge, sporting wood details and burgundy upholstery along with burger specials and streetwise games of pool on red felt in the back. Older gentlemen sat at tables in dim corners sipping rye whiskey, talking with other men about matters only other men would understand; some kept their hands high on the thighs of women who were not their wives—girls, really—who did not yet keep house and so still had inexact ideas about how the world worked and all of the ways in which they could be disappointed. The girls possessed a malleability, a willingness to be impressed, their cheeks, soft and new, flushing at even the most trivial compliments. These were sweet, bygone qualities the men wished to bottle and harbor for themselves.

  Fred took a swig from his drink and watched the young bartender over the rim of his glass. He liked the healthy way her hips moved under her black uniform skirt; the deep brown of her skin; the way she talked to other men, her oiled hair sweeping forward as she leaned over the bar to take their orders, a grin under every word. He liked that she knew what a two-dollar-a-drink tip was worth, and that his glass was never empty. Hilda smiled every time she made him a new one, as if they shared a secret—as if she knew him—and sometimes her fingers would linger over his, creating heft and heat.

  “Still good, Fred?” she’d ask from time to time, letting him watch her. Making sure he never lost sight of his importance. He was good. Fred lifted his glass to her, the bite of bourbon still glowing in his throat. “To beautiful friendships,” he said, and when Hilda laughed, even that seemed just for him.

  Fred spent thirty dollars at the bar before heading home. He kept the radio off, preferring just the sound of his tires crunching gravel on the road, the shake of the V6 under his seat. He’d bought the ’85 Buick Regal brand-new—­metallic blue with a racing stripe—as a present to himself after he’d turned fifty-two. When he’d driven it into the yard six years ago, his wife had laughed to see it, asking if this was the Band-Aid for his midlife event. “What’s next,” she’d hawed, “a mistress?” Fred had been offended. He wasn’t old, not yet, and he deserved nice things. Now, he caught his reflection in the rearview mirror.

  “You’re still the man,” Fred told himself, and watched his eyes to see if he believed it.

  Gloria was on the porch in her nightgown when he pulled up, a cigarette dangling between her elegant fingers. Fred cut the engine and sat for a moment, flexing his fists around the steering wheel, trying to calm himself. It wouldn’t do to start a fight. He got out of the car and hauled himself up the porch steps, leaning against the railing next to her. He studied her profile, the tufts of newly grown-out hair like shredded brown cotton, the petite ears and dished forehead, her angled jaw. The small triangle of skin beginning to loosen beneath her chin. The sheer nightgown slipped from one burnished shoulder and piled on the floorboards around her crossed ankles; it swallowed her. She looked like a child dressed in her mother’s clothes, and in that moment, he loved her terribly.

  The porch light glowed orange and flickered with dazed moths as Gloria let him watch her. She brought the cigarette to her mouth and took a long smooth drag. Fred imagined the smoke swirling down into the cage of her chest, every bone illuminated, turning what was left of her lungs the color of stone. She finally turned to face him, her eyes wet and penetrating in their dark hollows, and he remembered when he used to call her his little bit of Glory. He didn’t know when he’d stopped.

  “How was today?” he asked.

  “Fine as can be expected,” Gloria said, flicking ash.

  “And the doctor? What did he say?”

  “Fred.” She dropped his name like an anchor. “It’s fine.”

  He started to speak, then changed his mind. He wanted to shake her, grip hard into those bird-boned shoulders until he felt them snap, but only a monster would treat a dying person like that. Instead he held out his hand. “Let’s go inside.”

  She smiled at him, but didn’t move.

  “I’m sitting with the night,” she said, and looked over the yard toward the low edge of the horizon, still crimson from the parting sun. Fred’s shoulders sagged under the weight of sudden gravities: that she preferred her cigarettes and her own company to him. That she had even started smoking the damn things again in the first place, and now wasn’t troubling to hide it.

  When, two months ago, her oncologist had hustled them into his office with his grim face and rattled off his list of bloated, ugly words—recurrence, metastasis, inoperable—Gloria had taken it, dry-eyed, her head bobbing as if she too were a doctor, comfortable with the impersonal language of death. He recommended immediate and aggressive treatment and Fred had coughed into his hand. “What are our chances here?” he’d asked, and ignored how Gloria’s head whipped when he said it. “We’re not worried about the cost.” He wouldn’t let this white man or anyone else think they were poor. The doctor cleared his throat, said, “Studies suggest that patients in this stage, with targeted therapies prescribed in conjunction with homeopathic remedies, and rigorous adherence to the plan—” and Gloria stood up and left.

  Fred found her ten minutes later posted up at the car with her purse on the hood, pretending to pick dirt from her fingernails. As he unlocked the door, he’d given her a questioning look and she’d just shaken her head. Fred reflected that only she could
look annoyed after hearing a scary verdict like that. Only she could be so rankled. The first time they’d gotten this news last winter, she’d climbed back into the car and bawled the entire drive home and he’d had to carry her into the house. Fred waited for this delayed reaction, but she didn’t cry. Gloria said, looking out the window at the street going past, “None of that had anything to do with me. All that was, was two men talking in a room.”

  The reaction did come later that night as they ate dinner­—­smothered pork chops and mashed potatoes and peas—but not the one he had expected.

  “I’m not doing the chemo. I’m done.”

  “Baby, you’re in shock,” he’d told her, because he certainly was.

  It had been hard on her—the chemo, the radiation, each feeling more like additional sickness than any kind of treatment. They’d cut Gloria open and removed a lobe of lung, and now a long pillowy scar curved under her right breast, raised several centimeters from the surrounding skin. She said it was her last-minute souvenir, like Haha, what’d you bring me back from Cancerland? Forgetting the scar, the loss of her hair, the sores in her mouth, and the dizzy nausea and fear of it all, they’d beaten the cancer back. And just as they were celebrating, finally crawling toward something like normal—this. It felt like the worst betrayal, but Fred knew if they did it once, they could do it again. He repeated that, financially, they were good, just in case she felt guilty over how much killing the cancer cost. Fred was a provider—­always had been, always would be—a retired car-hauler who had worked since the age of thirteen. Above all else, he was a man, and he took care of his own. No one could say any different.