In ray freezer, vodka, a bottle so cold it burns your hands.
In my cupboard, salted peanuts, crackers shaped like little fish, a jar of sugar, an empty tin.
In my closet, the blue dress that fooled him.
If my lover is lucky, maybe I’ll still have yesterday’s tips.
When he kisses me on the steps, I’ll know that’s my thirty-four dollars bulging in his pocket. I’ll know I won’t see him again.
He never takes the keys to my car. It’s old, too easily trapped.
But tonight I have no lover. Tonight I danced in Paradise with a black-haired man. I clutched his coarse braid. All these years and I still wanted it. He pulled me close so I could feel the knife in his pocket. He said, Remember, I have this.
I don’t know if he said the words out loud or if they were in my head.
When I closed my eyes I thought he could be that boy, the one who blew himself into the sky, whose body fell down in pieces thin and white as ash and bread, the one who rose up whole and dripping, who slipped his tongue in my mouth, his hands down my pants.
He could have been that boy grown to a man.
But when I opened my eyes I thought, No, that boy is dead.
Later we were laughing, licking salt, shooting tequila. We kissed, our mouths sour with lime. He said we could go out back. He said if I had a dollar he’d pay the man. I gave him five, and he said we could stay the week for that. I kissed him one more time, light and quick. I said I had to use the ladies’ room.
Lady? he said, and he laughed.
I decided then. He was that boy, just like him. I said, Sit tight, baby, I’ll be right back. He put his hand on my hip. Don’t make me wait, he said.
I stepped outside, took my car, drove fast.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not too good for Niles Yellow Dog or any man. I’m not too clean to spend the night at that hotel. It wouldn’t be the first time I passed out on a back seat somewhere, hot and drunk under someone’s shadow, wrapped tight in a man’s brown skin.
But tonight I couldn’t do it. Tonight I came here, to my father’s house, instead. Tonight I watch him.
He’s stopped moving now. He’s in the chair. There’s one light on, above his head. I can’t help myself: I drink the whiskey I keep stashed. It stings my lips and throat, burns inside my chest. But even this can’t last.
I don’t believe in forgiveness for some crimes. I don’t believe confessions to God can save the soul or raise the dead. Some bodies are never whole again.
I cannot open the veins of my father’s heart.
I cannot heal his lungs or mend his bones.
Tonight I believe only this: we should have gone back. We should have crawled through the grass until we found that man.
If Vincent Blew had one more breath, I should have lain down beside him — so he wouldn’t be cold, so he wouldn’t be scared.
If Vincent Blew was dead, we should have dug the hard ground with our bare hands. I should have become the dirt if he asked. Then my father could have walked away, free of my burden, carrying only his own heart and the memory of our bones, a small bag of sticks light enough to lift with one hand.
LITTLE WHITE SISTER
MAMA WARNED ME, stay away from white girls. Once I didn’t. So, thirty years too late, I’m minding my mama. That’s how it happened.
I saw her. Flurries that night and she’s running, barelegged, wearing almost nothing at all, and the snow’s rising up in funnels, like ghosts, spinning across the street till they whip themselves against the bricks, and I’m thinking, Crazy white girl don’t know enough to come in from the cold.
Crackhead most likely, not feeling the wind. I’d seen the abandoned car at the end of the block, ten days now, shooting gallery on wheels, going nowhere. One of them, I told myself, pissed at her boyfriend or so high she thinks her skin is burning off her. Most times crackheads don’t know where they are. Like last week. Girl comes pounding on my door. White girl. Could’ve been the same one. Says she’s looking for Lenny. Says she was here with him last night. And I say, Lenny ain’t here, and she says, Let me in. I don’t like arguing with a white girl in my hallway, so I let her in. I say, Look around. She says, Shit — this isn’t even the right place. She says, What’re you tryin’ to pull here, buddy? And I back away, I say, Get out of here. I say, I don’t want no trouble, and she says, Damn straight you don’t want no trouble. Then she’s gone but I’m thinking, You can be in it that fast and it’s nothing you did, it’s just something that happens.
See, I’ve already done my time. Walpole, nine years. And I’m not saying Rita’s the only reason I went down, but I’m telling you, the time wouldn’t have been so hard if not for the white girl.
Cold turkey in a cage and I know Rita’s in a clinic, sipping methadone and orange juice. I’m on the floor, my whole body twisted, trying to strangle itself — bowels wrung like rags, squeezed dry, ribs clamped down on lungs so I can’t breathe, my heart a fist, beating itself. And I think I’m screaming; I must be screaming, and my skin’s on fire, but nobody comes, and nobody brings water, and I want to be dead and out of my skin.
Then I’m cold, shaking so hard I think my bones will break, and that’s when the rabbitman slips in between the bars. The rabbitman says, Once an axe flew off its handle, split an overseer’s skull, cleaved it clean, and I saw how easily the body opens, how gladly gives itself up; I saw how the coil of a man’s brains spills from his head — even as his mouth opens, even as he tries to speak. Then I saw a blue shadow of a man — people say he ran so fast he ran out of his own skin and they never found him, the rabbitman, but I tell you, they took my skin and I was still alive. Then the rabbitman whispered, I got news for you, little brother. I been talkin’ to the man and he told me, it ain’t time yet for this nigger to die.
So no, I don’t go chasing that girl in the street. I know she’ll be cold fast, but I think, Not my business — let one of her friends find her.
See, since Rita, I don’t have much sympathy for white girls. And I’m remembering what my mama told me, and I’m remembering the picture of that boy they pulled out of the Tallahatchie, sweet smiling boy like I was then, fourteen years old and a white girl’s picture in his wallet, so he don’t think nothing of being friendly with a white woman in a store. Then the other picture — skull crushed, eye gouged out, only the ring on his finger to tell his mama who he was, everything else that was his boy’s life gone: cocky grin, sleepy eyes, felt hat, his skinny-hipped way of walking, all that gone, dragged to the bottom of the river by a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. Mama said she wasn’t trying to turn me mean but she wanted me to see — for my own good, because she loved me, which is why she did everything, because she’d die if anything happened to me — and I thought even then something was bound to happen sooner or later, the fact of living in my black skin a crime I couldn’t possibly escape. I only had to look once for one second to carry him around with me the rest of my life, like a photograph in my back pocket that didn’t crack or fade, that just got sharper instead, clear as glass and just as dangerous till I pulled it out one day and realized I’d been staring at myself all those years.
I thought about that boy when I met Rita. He breathed on my neck and I laughed to make him stop. I didn’t go after her. It was nothing like that. It was just something that happened, like the white girl pounding at my door — I was watching it, then I was in it.