She went hard at the words.
He sensed her stiffness. What? He raised up on his elbows.
She watched him, hard.
Yo pussy ain’t no mo important than my dick.
Huh, well maybe I should be giving my pussy to someone who thinks it is important.
I didn’t say that it ain’t important.
What are you tryin to say?
Drop it. Jus drop it.
No, I want to know what you meant.
Drop it.
She did. She had learned to put up with his tongue. Red Hook had woven him. Judge the sample by the cloth.
He settled off into the first flutterings of sleep, a curved shape. She squeezed her eyes shut. Slowly, her body faded away, dissolved into the white sheets.
The next morning, he was quieter than usual. What to make of his silence? His sharp features often made his moods look worse than they were. She tried to conversate while they bathed and dressed. He would nod or mumble a word or two. She would bounce back with a question. There followed a long elastic silence. What should she do next? She knew how to handle his bad mouth: with a thick titty stuffed in it. But how could she break his silence? She decided to harbor her words and release them in the full light of day.
The sun was ripe. His sudden and harsh anger last night had set a warning in the sky. Something red and hungry hung in the air.
She hooked her arm in his and guided him toward the subway station. Are you mad at me?
No.
You’re mad at me?
No.
How come you so quiet then?
I jus don’t feel like talking right now.
Why not?
I jus don’t.
Why not?
I would have to talk to explain to you why I don’t want to talk.
She thought about it.
The day formed a red tube of silence that shuttled them to the subway station.
Okay, he said. We’re here. I’ll see you tonight. He put both hands on her shoulders and pulled her forward. Kissed her light on the lips.
What kind of kiss is that?
His eyes, full of hardness, held her. Loose paper curled in its own turnings. He pulled her close and gave her a wet searching kiss.
That’s better, she said.
Have a good one.
You too. Off to work?
Nawl. I gotta go home first.
Home?
Yeah.
She knew home, Red Hook, boiling with life and trouble. She wanted to say, Be careful. She prayed for him silently. God keep and protect. You want me to drive you?
Nawl. You be late fo yo assignment.
You want to take the car? She reached into her purse for the keys.
Nawl, baby. That’s alright.
Really, you can take it. She always let him drive when they went out on the town. Now, she was offering something more.
I can’t park no car like that around Red Hook. I’d have to drive it all the way back here.
Well, can’t you ride with me on the train?
I would but I gotta pick up my wares first.
I thought you said — she dropped it. Studied his sharp face. It did not hide his knowledge to know. With unsure fingers, she touched his baby-smooth cheek. Okay, she said. Be careful, she said.
He kissed her fingers. Smiled his confident smile. I will.
I love you, she said.
I love you too. He let her fingers fall to her side. He walked off with long, wide, muscular strides, undulating, stepping over oceans, continents.
See you tonight.
He spoke without turning around. Okay.
She said a prayer for him, uttered loud the Lord’s speechless name.
DEATHROW CAME FROM SOME FAR-OFF LINE OF THE HORIZON where sea touches sky, carrying his only cargo. The wide expanse of his body. The waves of his muscles. And it was this force — the crushing pressure that lay beneath his skin — that he showed to the world. But he showed her another face. That sticky child face when they ate bubble-gum ice cream, her favorite, tongues sharing their rainbow-covered fingertips. And he gave her his every free moment, riding the train all the way from Red Hook in South Lincoln, dragging his wares along, to her apartment in Hundred Gates (North Shore), an hour trip, or more.
Hmmm. You’re so young but so independent.
You gotta be. I’m trying to save enough money to start my own business in the Loop. A cafeteria. A coffee shop. Something like that.
I could help you, Porsha says. How much you need?
Thanks. I really appreciate it, but I gotta do this thing.
A typical evening, Deathrow kicks off his shoes the moment he steps through the door. Lies his untroubled flesh on her bed. Grabs her butt with his great rawboned wrists and hands and pulls her to him. Runs his fingers over her face, using them to draw her new features. Rubs wave after wave of exhausting caresses. The warmth eats its way deeper and deeper inside her. She slips a movie in the VCR, wondering how long it will be before he slips his hand down her panties — his sweaty palm cool against her hot butt — and tickles her asshole. They rarely made it through a movie. How long before his body raised away from himself to hers. At the moment he prepares to enter her, she slips into the bathroom, using the excuse, I got to pee. She rubs two dabs of aloe vera into her pussy, a trick she’d learned from Mamma. Aloe tightened an orifice. After fucking — his spent penis a beached whale — he takes great delight in the two small holes in each of her earlobes — four holes in all. (He has a single hole in his left ear that many took as the troubling sign of a thug.) Ever see Rosemary’s Baby?
You know I have, she replies. Horror movies are her favorite.
Now, one hole meant you worshipped the devil. You got four holes. What that mean?
She gets a damp washcloth, puts it over her forehead, a migraine shield. They lie sweating, skin to skin, beneath a heavy odor of flesh. Bone to bone, their ribs fit like a boat. She has learned his body by heart. Deathrow encircles the pillow with a sigh. Sinks into sleep with the speed of a stone in water. A storm breaks in his breathing. He wrestles and bucks, with jerky, electrical motions.
Her heart tightens. She thinks, still agitated, for his stormy breathing tosses her, leaves her on a shore of unrest. How to anchor herself? Take a sledgehammer to his stone heart? Wake him?
Once, she tried to wake him. A scream scratched its way through his teeth and he sat up swinging. One blow caught her full on the forehead. She retaliated, beat him senseless with the heel of her shoe.
The rise and fall of his sleeping chest calms her.
A rib cage bleached white in the desert, bones curving toward the sky, frantic ants moving in the hollow in between, taking him into the colony beneath, for he has a full cutaway, revealing the canals that snake for miles beneath the sand, torpedo-shaped larvae in the queen’s nest, and a worker transporting a beetle ten times its size back to the sand’s surface. The sun has hardly moved. Off in the distance, the square figurations of a ranch. A ball of tumbleweed rolls him closer until the ranch is a fixed block in his consciousness. Several horses escape the corral and run toward him at full speed, all thunder and fury, black manes streaming out behind them, but the pounding of their hooves upsets the image, unsteadies it, blurring the black and white patches on their bodies. Four cowboys give chase, catching at the bridles, lassos of blood spurting from their headless necks. Then bones—
Morning. The ridges of Deathrow’s shoulder blades form two humps under the sheet. He snaps upright in bed. Mornings give him an attitude, as if the new light has failed to wash away the old dreams, fails and floods him with renewed poison.