From a cooler in his trunk Rue has pulled two malt liquor cans. I take a sip. Everything will be all right, I think, if I play along with him. He’ll think he’s setting the rules. Rap grinds from his speakers, all about bitches and hos. I remember the days of Otis, Aretha. Try a little tenderness. Respect.
Rue tells me he’s begun supplying Strychly Speed to local cockers — “a new line of business I lucked-up into.” It’s a strychnine-laced drug designed to quicken the reflexes and ward off shock. Just as I’m trying to imagine the outré sex practices he means, we stop outside a corrugated steel warehouse. He leads me to a small wooden door beneath a cracked bulb; a series of coded knocks, soft and rapid, then we’re inside on a sawdust-covered floor reeking of dog shit and bug spray. Bloody feathers float through yellow light. “Ten on the red hat!” someone shouts. Another counters, “Thirty on the gray shirt!” A third man yells, “Ready, pit!” and men surge forward toward a wide dirt ring. Intense, blurry scrabbling. Rue nudges me ahead of him, closer to the action. Past T-shirted bellies and John Deere caps I glimpse a pair of roosters — green and white, yellow beaks. Steel strapped to their spurs. Their hackles stiffen. One bird rolls beneath the other, leaps up and spears his opponent’s lung with a razored foot. The injured rooster hunkers and refuses to budge, coughing up blood, wheezing — a sound like a broken door hinge. Tens and twenties circle the room.
Rue retreats into a dusty corner with a short man restraining two pit bulls on leashes. A leather bag, more bills. I loiter near a plywood booth where a Mexican man — red, roughened, fresh from the fields — sells cracked corn, maple peas, atole. He offers to polish the cockers’ gaffs on an electric whetstone. Two men pass me on their way to what one calls the drag pit, a small chalked area where another pair of birds prepares to battle. “Is he farm-walked?” one guy asks the other. “Yep. Real good game. Won six last month, back to back, over in Sunset.” They spit snuff into small plastic containers. One wears a rooster-spur earring.
A few women stand by a dented beer keg, chatting freely but eyeing each other suspiciously: after the roosters are done, these girls will be in a different kind of competition for the men’s attention. What was it Shirley once said to me? — “Black women raise their daughters, but they love their sons. It’s ingrained in us — even when we’re moms — to view younger women as a threat.”
I move close. “… he dogged her and dogged her, and she just gave it up.”
“Man’s gonna hit, he’ll hit, no matter how you play him. Then he’ll head on out.”
“That’s right. Have dick, will travel.”
They laugh.
“When you cut your hair, girl? Look like you just lathered up and took a straight razor to your sweet ol’ skull.”
“Got tired of fooling with those damn relaxers, you know?”
To my eye, they’re all too dark for the red and purple dresses they’re wearing. “Boy-thing” or no, I’ve got them all beat, I think. No wonder Rue came to me: only a fool would choose ground beef over filet mignon. I laugh at my own boldness, stand a little straighter. Move it or lose it, T. They look my way and frown.
Everyone at the drag pit — birds and men — looks beaten to a frazzle. Someone shouts, “Pit!” and the roosters go after one another, legs flailing, feathers drifting wildly like snow. The birds seem stuck together. Two handlers step in to separate them. “Roundhead’s hurt,” a man mutters. The birds are placed behind the score lines again; they glare and scratch the dirt. Released, they collide midair, then tumble to the ground. I can’t tell who has the advantage, but blood blackens the ring. The spectators press forward. They’re no longer yelling. Suddenly, we’re witnessing a funeral. One of the roosters droops and quivers in a puff of dust. His handler picks him up, blows on his beak, then sets him back down — a final sacrifice. The other bird slashes. Rue tugs my arm. “It’s over,” he says. “Let’s go.”
“Is that bird dead?”
“If he ain’t, he will be once they pull his head off.”
In the stairwell in my building, I continue to play along. To play the player. This is no one-way deal, no matter what he thinks. He kisses my neck. I let him take my hand.
Through an open door we hear a TV talking head insisting on ousting Saddam Hussein and making the world a safer place to live. “Zat so?” someone says to the screen. “Let me tell you, Mr. Pun-dit, white folks’ problems ain’t nothing but white folks’ problems. Ain’t our lookout.”
We pass a twenty-something girl on the second landing. She’s wearing a halter top and a short yellow skirt. In her right hand she holds a dead white moth, in her left, a compact mirror. She crushes the moth, grinds its wings between her fingers and, watching herself in the mirror, spreads the dust on her eyelids. “Beautiful, baby,” Rue tells her. “You gonna go far.” I tug his hand.
As we stand at my door, and I flick through the keys on my ring, he grins like he’s about to spring a trap. Poor, deluded boy. He’s in as much need of healing, education, and understanding as I am. I see this; he doesn’t. Things are so fucked up between black men and women — have been for so long — it’s hard to see anything clearly.
Inside, I kick the doll’s head over to a corner, out of the way. I remember Ariyeh as a girl changing her dolls, taking black Marks-A-Lot to their cheeks, trying to make them look like her. “They already look like you” she used to tell me. Rue watches me now, and I see he’s thinking something similar. He thinks he can do whatever he wants to me, the nice, polite dime piece. He doesn’t believe I have it in me to throw a niggerbitchfit and bring the whole building running. I don’t know if I have it in me, either, but I tell myself, You’re in charge. You’re in charge. Look at how he looks at you. The shut-in boy, all grown up. And he’s yours now. Yours.
He pulls me to him, more gently than I expected, and I imagine myself in Reggie’s embrace. That’s it, Player. Fill my fantasy then drain it. Take it all out of me. Whatever you say, whatever you want. I won’t think about the dangers. Or the pleasure. Absolution’s what I’m after.
As his mouth finds mine, I feel a familiar drift, the dropping of a mask … truth is, I never feel so white as when a black man wants me. It’s my difference he desires; he wants to tear me down, but this impulse feeds his passion. The fact that he can’t really reach me fuels it even more. That’s it, Player, that’s it. It’s all just a game and I’ve won it in advance — look how lost you are, grabbing, tugging, gasping …
He carries me to bed. For a moment he looks at me as if he’s asking forgiveness, not for what he’s about to do or for the street life that’s killing him, but as if he were every missing father in the neighborhood, as if we were every sad night ever spent by a man and a woman who want to please each other but never learned tenderness.
He holds me to the mattress. Lips brush my nipples. Considerate, slow. Skillful. That’s it, Player. I’m too self-conscious to come, but don’t you stop, all right, don’t let up. Slip me all your pain. Let me kiss it. Make it better. Show me what Mama felt the night she met my daddy. Mama, see, your story’s not over. You’re not really gone … you’ve got to come save me now, save me, see, my soul’s in trouble here.