The platform at the summit was little more than a crow’s nest with just enough room for two people to stand comfortably. It was protected by a waist-high metal railing, and she was gripping it with both hands, her back to the edge, facing him, so when he was able to stand free of the steps, slightly winded, he was only inches from her. He knew the view was spectacular; when he was young he tended to stay below when he brought company because of the lack of room up here, and even at night the cops could easily see you at the top if they were looking. But he had loved it, he remembered now, had loved creeping up here by himself on the occasional night when he was alone, or with a girl who was particularly daring. He never stayed long, and the climb had always been scary, but it had been worth it.
Dana let go of the railing, put her arms around his waist, and kissed him deeply on the mouth, her tongue caressing his teeth. Then she pulled her tongue out, sucking his into her with a wine-soaked fierceness that aroused him in a way he hadn’t known since adolescence.
She pulled back and laughed so softly that the wind carried it away altogether; he couldn’t hear it but could feel it radiating off her; it only made her more magnetic, more hot, more sexually necessary to him.
She said, “This place was my good luck charm too.” He could just make her voice out in the wind that blew the stars around over their heads. “Maybe it wasn’t you, Ronnie. Maybe it was the place itself.” She turned around, pushing her hips against the railing, and he pressed himself into her back, pressed himself in her ass, into the backs of her thighs. “Ronnie, I never thought about it before,” she was saying, “but you were right. Everything good for me started here.” Her body rubbed against his as she turned around, facing him again, and she had a handkerchief in her hand, and all he could think of was a handjob where she needed something to keep herself from getting all sticky. He could smell her warm, Merlotinfused breath as she said into his mouth, “I thought it was just an accident. Bad luck. But it was like a sacrifice or something. It’s been twenty-one years. Is that a significant number?” She laughed and Ronnie tried to understand what she was saying. “Maybe twenty years is the limit,” she continued. “I didn’t mean for anything to happen, but maybe that’s why everything went so well after that. I got everything I wanted.”
And then Ronnie realized that she was talking about Boneless Bernie, and he felt her hands, like pistons on his chest, two blows so hard they hurt, and who would expect a woman to be so strong she could hurt you like that? And then he felt like he was swimming, only it was through air instead of water. He hit something that felt sharp like a gunshot, and then he was free again, falling, and it was like a carnival ride that you know is a terrible mistake as soon as it starts moving, but you can’t get off no matter what, and even through the dark he could see her, so far up, blowing him a kiss, and already wiping down the railing at the top of the giant inverted teardrop, before he met the broken asphalt.
Still Air
by Terrance Hayes
East Liberty
The morning after Amp got killed our neighborhood was lit up with rumors. My mother and me, we barely even made the block before someone passing said, almost with a whistle, “You hear that nigga Amp got popped by some gangbangers?” Someone else said, carrying the news like a bag of bricks, “Sad what happened to that boy who got robbed last night.” People who didn’t know Amp or his kin said, “I know his mother.” “I knew his pops.” Rumors idled in the slow drag of the traffic, the rich Fox Chapellers and Aspinwallers who drove across the Allegheny River into what was our little moat of trouble: Penn Circle, the road looping East Liberty like a noose.
Lies, gossip, bullshit, half-truths spread out, carried in the school and city buses. Pompano heard it was two white guys, probably plainclothes cops, that took Amp out. Walking by with her girlfriends, Shelia said she heard gunshots and shouts. “Amp went out shooting shit up like a true thug,” she cackled, pointing her finger at me like the barrel of a gun. Her girlfriends laughed like she wasn’t talking about someone who’d actually been killed. I mean, Amp was dead and people was already kicking his name around like it never had any air inside it.
This is why I never wanted anybody to give me a nickname. Well, that ain’t exactly true. Most people call me Demario, but I used to let Star call me Fish sometimes. My grandmother used to call me Fish. Her “little fish,” even though I was taller than her by the time I was fourteen. I didn’t even know Amp’s real name. Maybe I heard a teacher say it when we was in preschool at Dilworth. Anthony Tucker. Andrew Trotter. By first grade the teachers, even Principal Paul with her thick-assed eyeglasses and that belt squeezed too tight around her gray pantsuit, called Amp “Amp.” It was the only name he answered to.
I can’t really say he was my friend, though, to tell you the truth. He was never really in class that much, and then he dropped out of high school junior year. Star said it was because he wanted to get a job as soon as he heard she was pregnant, but I think he’d have dropped out anyway. He spent his days on the corner behind Stanton Pharmacy. He was always there in jeans so new it looked like he hadn’t even washed them yet. New sneakers, pro jerseys — people said he had a Steelers jersey for damn near every player. You’d think he’d be there waving his shit in my face or calling me a clown, but I don’t think he ever even noticed me. He’d look right through me, call me youngblood even though we were the same age.
And once he sold me a hammer, I shit you not. It was in the book bag on my shoulders that morning. Even crazier, he sold my mother a big twenty-four-inch level. How he got her to buy it, I’ll never know. But that’s what he did — or what he’d been doing for the last couple of months. Word was out and people, mostly old dudes trying to make ends doing handy work or whatever in Highland Park, would buy shit from him. He’d take you around the corner to a grocery cart full of stuff. I saw he had a cordless drill and a circular saw one day. An empty paint bucket and a couple of utility knives the next. I bought the hammer for two dollars. It was big too. Practically a mallet. I doubt Amp kept what he didn’t sell. He just wanted to get paid. Rumor was, he was stealing things from Home Depot, but I saw the shit. Most of it was used. None of it was useless but most of it was used.
You’d find him near Stanton Pharmacy with that dog that always followed him around, some scrawny watered-down pit bull he called Strayhorn. The dog always barked at me. It’d go to barking like it wanted to bite me in my kneecaps when I passed and wouldn’t stop until I was down the street. For a long time I thought Amp was whispering sickems in the dog’s dull gray ears, but now I think he was just talking all kinds of mysterious shit to it. That’s why Star liked him. Why she dumped me for him, I guess. She said he had poetry in him.
“I heard they killed the boy’s dog too!” my mother said to her friend Miss Jean as we stood waiting for the 71A. This is what I tried to do every morning: walk my mother to her bus. It was the only time we got to talk since I was usually knocked out by the time she came home from work in the hospital kitchen. I know it sounds like I’m some kind of momma’s boy or that I’m soft-hearted, but it was something my grandmother made me promise to do. In fact, I only started calling my mother “Mother,” instead of “Marie” like I used to, after my grandmother died. I used to call my grandmother “Mother” and my mother “Marie,” because when we all lived together in the East Mall projects, that’s what I heard them call each other. You remember the East Mall? The damn building used to straddle Penn Avenue, cars drove right beneath it. Now that that shit’s been demolished, I almost can’t believe we lived there. I mean, who puts a building right on top of the street? If Penn Circle was the moat, well, the East Mall was like one of its bankrupt castles. No, better yet, it was like an old drawbridge that couldn’t be lowered. Anyway, we were on the fifth floor so I never heard any actual traffic, but when I looked out of my window, I could see the cars going and coming 24/7. I could see the houses in four neighborhoods at once: Shadyside, Friendship, East Liberty, I could see where Penn Avenue curved up the hill to Garfield.