I drop the food and the flour poofs across the front of my dress as it hits the floor. Urchin is still wearing his mask, but I don’t wait to see what he looks like when they take it off.
An officer has thrown a blanket over Martin’s shoulders. He is shaking, but not because he is cold. He opens his mouth as if he has something important to tell me. His words are nearly inaudible.
“Next time,” Martin says again, only now he means it.
But I barely hear him. All I hear is what resonates in my head: the crack of a gun, the thud of Urchin’s body as it falls to the floor, the shattering of glass, the crush of policemen pushing through the door and scattering through this house, no longer my own, a legion of strangers splitting and dividing like cancerous cells. I don’t know them, but I know what the crack of a gun sounds like, and I know how it sounds when a man gets killed. This is what they have given me.
I step over the spilled groceries and exit through the door Urchin came in from. I head out to the field, away from the commotion, the camera crews, and flashing lights, and neighbors, away from Martin, who is probably too shaken up to notice that I’ve gone. I walk and I walk away from the smell of gunpowder and white cream sauce, and the wind rises up and blows the flour off my dress like sand across dunes, and as I continue to walk west, wading through the knee-high weeds, I notice that my abdomen is swelling, too subtle at first to be certain, and too obvious then not to be, and I notice, placing my hand on the firm, warm swell, that I just happen to be walking in the direction of the setting sun.
BLACK COWBOY
Carmen Elena Mitchell
At my door is Jesse, all grown up. Six feet tall, with dark curls, wearing presents on his head.
The 1930s leather cowboy hat and lasso are from the character he’s playing in Hollywood’s latest version of American History: Black cowboy saves town, teaches White girl to love. The miniature wooden pipe on a leather string around his neck is from his costar. The diamond stud in his ear is from a forty-year-old married lady.
His dark skin glows like there’s a light underneath it. He smells like the road.
When we were young he was a spidery, long-legged boy with too much hair. We would wrestle in piles with the other kids after school. Later in high school he was a tall, looming Othello, to my quivering Desdemona. In college, he did a dog food commercial and learned to drink beer from the bottom of the can. He showed me how when he’d come back on holidays, while I wiped cinnamon roll onto my apron at the diner. Saving up for someday, I’d tell him.
But we were friends once upon a time.
And now here he is looking so tall and rich under the lonely, swinging bulb that is my trailer home. And here I am in “someday,” three states later. Different diner.
In the film he saves a white girl from drowning. The mayor’s daughter. He starts out as a bandit. But then he saves her. She saves him from banditry. Their love saves the town from ruin. One of them is going to have to die in the end, but the producers haven’t figured out which. They are shooting on location in a city just north of here.
Jesse will stay with me in this small Midwestern town for a week before he goes back to complete the shoot. He will stay with me and feed my plants and make me leave the trailer occasionally to go dancing. He will make me love the hills again. He will make my friends seem interesting. I will make him chili.
Tonight I make him chili. He thinks we should add beer to it. But, no, we must follow the recipe. I am adamant. This is the only thing I know how to make that doesn’t come in a box. That involves measuring spoons. It is the secret of a small town in the Midwest famous for its chili. A leaked recipe. Top with grated cheese and scallions. Serve over spaghetti. It is perfume. We have his beer as a side and eat on our laps.
Tonight after dinner we drive to a gay bar. A small, dark window in a quiet alley that flashes BAR in red neon. Sunflowers growing up in the garbage outside. Enter through the secret door. Inside it is all palm trees and plastic fruit. Men in dresses, men in chaps, big men in baseball caps, imprints of wedding rings on their sunburned fingers. Several women in flannel with long, tiered hair and plain faces. The only nightlife I find bearable in this small, Midwestern town. I was a regular here once upon a time. A skinny black-eyed susan among the sunflowers, and slugs. They know me here. They kiss me here.
Jesse and I lean into each other at the bar. I look up at the angles of his cheekbones, his full lips that looked so odd on him when he was younger. His face has grown into something made for the long, slow glances of film.
The boys love him. They tell me, “Good goin’, girlfriend. Are you sure he’s straight?”
He is watching them like a foreign film. He asks me to translate handkerchiefs, and mustaches. What do they mean? I ask him if it reminds him of the frat house. All that aftershave and muscle. The dance of men’s bodies.
Jesse buys me shots of Jaegermeister. I’m thinking he’s trying to get me drunk. All week we’ve been drinking and getting stoned and sitting together on the futon.
Tonight we stumble home, almost too loaded to talk. We sit on the futon, heads bobbing, and he tells me about a party on the set. How he and his costar, a good-looking, blond cowboy who is all teeth (the one the white girl’s supposed to marry), and some other man, some big-talking, graying Hollywood type, stayed late on into the night. Doing shots. How Jesse collapsed next to the punch bowl, fishing for pineapple. How someone slumped on a sofa, watching through a bottle of champagne, unable to move, told him later how Hollywood had pushed Jesse’s limp body up against the back of a couch. How he’d undone Jesse’s belt and slid his pants down to his knees. Through the bottle, watching the whole time, the fat pink and mahogany of their skins collide. Big pink flaps crashing in waves.
“It’s fucked up,” he says, staring out into the cold in front of him. We are floating in a fog, his form appearing and disappearing. Waving at each other from two pieces of a sinking ship. Hold on tight to the brown bottle. Peel the label. Take a another drink from a broken oar.
“No one else knows.”
I’m sorry.
Jesse was the first boy I ever kissed. Seventh grade, truth or dare. Boy-girl party in someone’s pink bedroom under the lacy canopy. It took me forever. I was terrified of missing his lips. His big, dark eyes, rimmed in their curly, boy lashes, so patient while I calculated angles.
Tonight too goes on and on. He touches my leg, slaps a hand on my thigh. A signal. It’s been over a decade since seventh grade. I turn to kiss him. The room rotates, and is swallowed by the black of my dress going over my head. We are at strange angles. We roll over and over banging into chairs and upturning the wobbly, splintering spool that serves as a coffee table.
Now my back is kissing cold linoleum. Now I am biting his ear. Now he is scraping my skin off with his fingernails. Now there is blood and he is whispering drunkenly into my neck.
“You know, you have your period.”
I sit up, loosening myself from him. There is blood coating my legs, in sticky, body prints across the linoleum, on him. The horror of red disappearing into brown. I run from the trail. Under the blinking fluorescent light in the tiny bathroom I look down. There is so much. It keeps coming. It is too red, too bright, too flat. It is all wrong. Months of missed periods converging. I stand in the shower, leaning back against the wall and let the cold hit me. Hard little nails pinning me to the plastic wall. I sit on the toilet, dripping and shivering, my head curled over on my lap. Holding down the nausea. Trembling, whispering curses to myself.
I find a towel and creep back into the room. A pad and some sweats in the shallow closet. He has pulled out the futon, and is lying facedown in the middle, his clothes back on. There is an icy space next to him. I sit in the middle of it. In the other corner is the cushioned window seat, like the side of a ship. Pull up the lid to find my snowy down comforter. Remnants of home, and a big princess bed. From the days when I reigned. Before the crown fell. A big pillow to bury myself under.
&n
bsp; I sleep in the window, against the cold glass—cocooned in feathers, feeling the pad between my legs.
The next day he is not there when I get home from work. He has washed the floor. My dress is hanging on the laundry line outside. My plants repositioned as to better catch the sun.
He comes back later with no words. We fall asleep together on the futon. Under the glaze of TV, movie star lovemaking flashes across our noses.
The next morning he leaves in a cab. His cowboy hat back on. His lasso circling his shoulder. His pipe forgotten on the coffee table. Tired but ready for more adventures. A quick kiss, on the side of the mouth, not looking into my eyes.
PINBALL
Jason Rekulak
I am waiting here to meet a man I’ve never met, to do things I’ve never done before with another man. I don’t know what he looks like, or how old he is, or even his name. All I have is a promise to meet here in the Pinball Palace, today, at six o’clock. And already he is twenty minutes late.
I’m going to wait a little longer, just to see if he shows up. Because you have to wonder what kind of guy would actually do this. I move through the crowds, trying to spot him before he spots me. Some people I can rule out immediately: guys in groups, guys with women, guys pushing baby strollers. But after that, it’s hard. The arcade is full of high school boys and frat boys and paperboys. A tattooed skater punk is kicking the Lethal Enforcers game. An off-duty security guard drops quarters into a pinball machine. I move around them all, not staying in any one place too long. This guy—the one I’m looking for—he could be anyone.
1.
My name is Richard Szatowski and I am twenty years old. I lost my virginity at age thirteen, and since then I’ve had more girlfriends than any guy working in this mall. There’s always someone new, and she’s always very beautiful and very feminine: long hair, slender legs, full breasts. I’ve been asked to six proms, three college formals, a zillion weddings, and already one class reunion. I’ve slept with the Assistant Manager of CD World, with the head of the Macy’s gift wrap department, and with nearly all the girls working at Old Navy. I’ve been in the same relationship for the last four months; we have sex several times a week and my girlfriend claims it is the best she’s ever had. Now, I’m not saying any of this to brag—I just want you to know where I stand.
The trouble started three days ago, Tuesday morning, as Shereen and I were on the verge of another fight.
“Basic?” She sat up in bed, leaning on her elbow. “What do you mean, basic?”
I put my arm around her. “Not in a bad way—”
“You said, ‘It just gets basic after a while.’”
“It does.”
“It does?”
“Why are you taking this the wrong way?”
She pulled back, lifting the blankets up to her shoulders. “You’re saying you’re bored.”
“I didn’t say that.” I moved my hand across her waist, pinching her hip, and she slapped at it like she’d been stung.
“Don’t,” she warned.
So I rolled onto my stomach, my face shoved into a pillow. “Whatever.”
I was not bored. Shereen had a great body and she knew it, so I’m not sure why she was giving me attitude. I was just trying to explain what I saw as a simple fact of life: once you got used to a person, no matter who they were, sex would become familiar, monotonous. In other words, basic.
Shereen would take something like that the wrong way. Even after four months, she still didn’t trust me. She still monitored the friends I went out with, making sure there were never any girls, and I always had to lie if I went to a nudie bar. She wouldn’t believe that I only went to drink and hang out, that the dancers on stage did very little for me. She was convinced I would leave her for the next beautiful woman I met.
A little later Shereen got up and went into the bathroom, my blankets draped around her shoulders and waist. Before turning on the shower she made a big show of locking the door. I just sprawled out on my bed, enjoying the extra space. It was a twin, not wide enough for two people, and when she stayed over I never slept well.
• • •
We set off for the mall in silence. I drove, and Shereen sat in the passenger seat, holding her overnight bag in her lap. “You’re not staying tonight?” I asked, just to be sure.
She shook her head. “And it doesn’t get basic after a while. If anything, it gets more meaningful—more complex—which just shows how little you know what you’re talking about.”
I shrugged. “All right.”
“Don’t all right me.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re bored, is what it is. I’m boring you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Is there something you want to try?” she asked. “Some kind of—”
“No.”
“You don’t even want to try?”
“I do. Just forget what I said.”
• • •
One night a few weeks ago, I was hanging about the mall food court, waiting for the 6:30 bus. A nearby pay phone was ringing and ringing, some fifteen or twenty times. Finally I walked over and answered.
“Yes,” a man said, “my name is Lawrence Donovan and I’m calling on behalf of the Ross Marketing agency. Would you care to take part in a consumer fashion survey?”
I was just killing time, anyway. “Sure.”
He took my name, my age, my permanent address, my telephone number, my height (5’8”) and my weight (160). He explained that the survey was about women’s fashion and asked if I was currently involved with someone. I told him I was, and answered his questions about Shereen. She was my age, my height, slim, with kinky brown hair that fell to her shoulders and wide brown eyes. “And what kind of outfits do you prefer her in?” he asked. I told him just about anything; Shereen is a stylist for Glamour Shots, so looking good comes natural to her. “You’re lucky,” he joked.
“I know.”
Still laughing, he asked if she wore any lingerie that was out of the ordinary. I thought he was kidding, then realized he wasn’t.
“I guess not,” I said. “Pretty much normal stuff.”
“Normal, as in . . .”
“I don’t know. Bras? Underwear?”
“Would you enjoy seeing her in something more risqué?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“Think about it now,” he told me. “Imagine Shereen in a black silk camisole and matching thong bikini, wearing nothing else. On your bed. Describe her to me.”
And by then I guess I knew that it wasn’t a fashion survey, that this Lawrence Donovan was some kind of nut. But I didn’t hang up.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Don’t know what?” he asked. “Come on. Visualize.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“No,” I told him. “There’s someone on the phone next to me.”
He paused. “I understand,” he said. “But you’ve fucked her?”
“Yes.”
“Up the ass?”
“No. That’s disgusting.”
“What about blow jobs?”
“Yes.”
“Good?”
“Yes.”
“You go down on her?”
“No,” I said. “She thinks that’s disgusting, too.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t care either way.”
“Have you tried phone sex?”
“No.”
“I could call you at home,” he said.
And I realized just how much I’d told this man: He knew my phone number, my address, my girlfriend’s address. He knew what we looked like. “I’ll call the police,” I said. “I swear to God.”
“Don’t be a cunt,” he hissed.
I hung up. In another ten minutes I was on the bus, feeling sick to my stomach, and then I got off and walked the rest of the way to my apartment. When I arrived home, the red light on my answering machine was blinking; it wa
s another hour before I built up the nerve to play my messages, and when I finally did they were only from my mother.
But then my phone starting ringing in the middle of the night—12:30, 1:30, four in the morning. I never answered and it was never a problem unless Shereen stayed over. “Why don’t you get that?” she’d ask, half-asleep.
“Too tired,” I’d answer in a groggy voice, even though the sound of the telephone had jarred me awake. I’d switch off the ringer and then try to fall back asleep. Shereen suspected another woman, of course, but after two weeks the calls just stopped, and that was the end of that.
But in a weird way, I wasn’t as relieved as I thought I’d be. Because I still found myself wondering: What kind of guy would actually do that?
• • •
I sell sneakers at the Foot Locker for six bucks an hour—no commission, no benefits. That Tuesday morning, by the time I finished arguing with Shereen and stopped off for a Pepsi, I was twenty minutes late. My boss is a stickler for punctuality. He’s tall, well-built, and wears the same clothes as his employees: black and white referee jerseys, black sweats, white sneakers. He was searching for a foot measurer when I arrived, then grabbed the whistle hanging from his neck and blew into it. “Number forty-four!” he shouted. “You’re late!”
I walked over. “Sorry, Coach.”
“Late again, I’ll slap you with a penalty.”
Coach always talked like that. In the mornings, before the store opened, he’d pull us into a big huddle and outline sales strategies.
“You’re doing inventory this morning,” he said, and placed a thick black marker into my hand. “Start with the Reeboks.” Then he pushed me away and slapped my behind; I sprung forward and splashed Pepsi all over my referee jersey.
“Easy, sport,” he laughed. “Something the matter?”