First, Body Read online

  I think, Maybe she’s already dead and I’ll find her, touch her once and leave the perfect print of my hand burned on her thigh. I don’t have a phone, and anyway, too late to call. They’d wanna know Why’d you wait so long?, and I’d be gone.

  Last time they found a white woman dead on this hill police turned into a lynch mob, got the whole city screaming behind them. Roadblocks and strip searches. Stopped every dark-skinned man for miles if he was tall enough and not too old. Busted down doors, emptied closets, shredded mattresses, and never did find the gun that was already in the river. But they found the man they wanted: tall, raspy voice, like me. He’s got a record, long, shot a police officer once. He’s perfect. He can be sacrificed. No education, string of thefts. Even his own people are glad to turn him over, like there’s some evil here and all we got to do is cut it out. I’m thinking, Nobody kills the woman and leaves the man alive. Even an ignorant nigger. But the police, they don’t think that way. They need somebody. Turns out the husband did it. Shot his wife. Pregnant, too. Months later, white man jumps, bridge to river, January, he’s dead, then everybody knows. But that black guy, he’s still in jail. Violating parole. Some shit like that. Who knows? They got him, they’re gonna keep him.

  I hear two voices, and they both sound like my mama. One tells me, She’s human, go. And one whispers, You got to keep yourself alive. One’s my real mama and one a devil with my mama’s voice.

  Something howled. I thought it was the wind. I wanted to lean into it, wrap my arms around it. I wanted it to have a mouth, to swallow me. Or I wanted to swallow it, to cry as it cried, loud and blameless.

  It was nearly dawn and I was ashamed, knowing now which voice belonged to my mama. I held the girl in my mind. She was light as a moth, bright as a flame. I knew she was dead. It was as if she’d called my name, my real one, the one I didn’t know until she spoke it. I felt her lungs filling under my hand. She said, There’s one warm place at the center of my body where I wait for you.

  Stray finds her. Mangy wolf of a dog. Smells her. Even in this cold, he knows. And it’s like he loves her, the way he calls, just whining at first, these short yelps, high and sad, and when nobody comes he starts howling, loud enough to wake the dead, I think, but not her. And it’s day, the first one.

  We’re out there in the cold, nine of us in the alley, hunched, hands in pockets, no hats, shivering, shaking our heads, and one guy is saying, Shit, shit, because he remembers, we all remember, the last time.

  I see her close, thirty-five at least but small, so I thought she was a girl, and I think of her that way now. I kneel beside her. Her eyes are open, irises shattered like blue glass. Wind ruffles her nightgown, exposes her. Snow blows through her hair, across bare legs, between blue lips. I see bruises on her thighs, cuts on her hands, a face misaligned, and I think, I have bones like these, broken, healed, never the same. My hand aches in the cold.

  I know now what happened, why she’s here. I see her keeper. She smokes his cigarettes, he whacks her. She drinks his beer, he drags her to the toilet, holds her head in the bowl. He’s sorry. I’ve heard the stories. I’ve seen the women. And I’ve been slammed against a cement wall for looking the man in the eye. I’ve been kicked awake at three A.M. because some motherfucker I offended told the guards I had a knife. The keepers make the rules, but they’re always shifting: we can’t be good enough.

  Police stay quiet. Don’t want to look like fools again. And nobody’s asking for this girl. Stray, like the dog. They got time.

  I know now what her body tells them: stomach empty, liver enlarged, three ribs broken, lacerations on both hands — superficial wounds, old bruises blooming like yellow flowers on her back and thighs. Death by exposure. No crime committed here. And they don’t care who cut her, and they don’t care who broke her ribs, because all her people are dead or don’t give a shit, and she was the one, after all, who ran out in the snow, so who’s to say she didn’t want to die.

  I drink port because it’s sweet, gin because it’s bitter, back to back, one kills the taste of the other. I can’t get drunk. Three days now since we found her and I see her whole life, like she’s my sister and I grew up with her. She’s a child with a stick drawing pictures in the dirt. She’s drawn a face and I think it must be her own face but I say, What are you drawing? And she says, Someone to love me. I say, What are you trying to do, break my heart? And she says, If you have a heart, I’ll break it. I say, Where’s your mama? And she says, She’s that pretty lady with red lips and high heels — you’ve probably seen her — but sometimes her lipstick’s smeared all down her chin and her stockings are ripped and she’s got one shoe in her hand and the spike is flying toward me — that’s my mother. I say, Where’s your daddy? And she says, He’s a flannel shirt torn at the shoulder hanging in the closet ever since I’ve been alive and my mother says that’s the reason why.

  Then I see she’s not a child; she’s a full-grown woman, and her hands are cut, her hands are bleeding, and I say, Who did this to you? She won’t answer, but I know, I see him, he’s her lover, he’s metal flashing, he’s a silver blade in the dark, and she tries to grab him but he’s too sharp. Then she’s running, she’s crying, and I see her in the street, and I think she’s just some crazy white girl too high to feel the cold, and I don’t go.

  Now she’s talking to me always. She’s the sound underneath all other sounds. She won’t go away. She says, I used to make angels in the snow, like this; I used to lie down, move my arms and legs, like this, wings and skirt, but that night I was too cold, so I just lay down, curled into myself, see, here, and I saw you at your window, and I knew you were afraid, and I wanted to tell you, I’m always afraid, but after I lay down I wasn’t so cold, and I was almost happy, and I was almost asleep, but I wanted to tell you, I’m your little white sister — I know you — we’re alone.

  NOBODY’S DAUGHTERS

  1 IN THESE WOODS

  I waited for you in the rain. My tongue hurt. I’d been telling lies all day. Lies to the four Christian teenagers who thought they could save me. My first ride, Albany to Oneonta — they sang the whole way. More lies to the jittery pink-skinned man who took me north. He offered tiny blue pills and fat black ones. He said, It’s safe — don’t worry — I’m a nurse. He said, I’ll make you feel good.

  I think I had a sister once. Everywhere I go she’s been before me. There’s no getting out of it.

  When the pink nurse stopped to piss, my sister Clare whispered, Look at him — he’ll kill you if he can. I hid in the woods by the lake full of stumps. I didn’t move. I let the sky pour through me. He called the name I’d said was mine. Sometimes I heard branches breaking. Sometimes only rain. Finally he yelled at me, at who he thought I was. He said, No more games. He said, Fine, freeze your ass. His voice cracked. I could have chosen him instead of you, but Clare breathed on my hands. She said, He doesn’t have anything you want.

  You were driving toward me, your blue truck still hours away. Cold rain, cars whipping water — only my faith made me wait. I swear I knew you, your soft beard, how it would be. But you never imagined us together. You never meant to stop for me.

  This I won’t tell. This you’ll never know. Mick says I’m fourteen going on forty. I’ve got that dusty skin, dry, my eyes kind of yellowish where they’re supposed to be white. It’s the rum I drink, and maybe my kidneys never did work that well. Mick, who is my mother’s husband now, says I’ll be living on the street at sixteen, dead at twenty. He says this to me, when we’re alone. Once I paid two dollars, let Mama Rosa read my palm to see if he was right, and she told me I was going to outlive everyone I love.

  I know I’m strange. I drift. Maybe I’m smoking a cigarette, leaning on the bricks. Somebody’s talking. Then I’m not there. I’m a window breaking. I’m pieces of myself falling on the ground. Later I wake up in my own body and my fingers are burned.

  Clare says, Just stand up.

  She’s careless, my sister. She gets drunk. She puts other pe
ople’s blood in her veins. Her skin’s hot. She goes out in the cold without her coat and waits for her lover to come. Wind drives snow in her face. Ice needles her bare arms. Some night she’ll lie down in the woods and he won’t find her. Some night she’ll lie down in the road.

  It’s November. I know because there are Halloween men rotting in all the yards, snagged on fences, skewered on poles. Pumpkin heads scooped hollow — they stink of their own spoiled selves. One boy’s stuck in a tree. His head’s a purple cabbage. You could peel him down to his brainless core.

  I know some men downtown, Halloween men trying to walk on stuffed legs. Rags on sticks, pants full of straw, foul wind blowing through them to scare the crows. I think they made themselves. They have those eyes. Carved. Candles guttering inside their soft skulls.

  They live in a brick house you can’t blow down — boards instead of windows, nails in the doors. They tell me, Come alone.

  They have dusted joints and I have seven dollars. They have pocketsful of pills and I have pennies I found in the snow. I know how easy it is to go down the steps to the basement, to stand shivering against the wall. Nothing hurts me. Earl says, Pain is just a feeling like any other feeling. He should know. Knife, slap, kiss, flame. He says, Forget their names and they pass through you. Earl has wooden arms and metal hands. His left ear’s a hole, his nose a bulb of flesh from somewhere else. He sits in the corner and smokes. He holds the joint in his silver claw. His long feet are always bare. When he whispers in his half-voice, everything stops.

  No money the night before I found you. One of the Halloween men said, Come with me. He had pink hearts and poppers. He knew I’d need them. He said, It’s dangerous to sleep. I looked at Earl. I thought his lips moved. I thought he said, Nothing lasts too long.

  This speedboy with poppers was the whitest man I ever saw. When I closed my eyes he was a white dog bounding through streets of snow. I tried not to think of his skin, all of it, how bright it was, how his body exposed would blind me, how his white palms blazed against my hips. I thought of Earl instead, smooth arms, cool hands, Earl who only burned himself, hair flaming around soft ears, holy angel, face melting into bone.

  Clare said, Nobody will find you.

  The whiteman was in me, close enough to hear; he said, Not even God.

  God doesn’t like to watch little girls pressed against basement walls. God doesn’t like little girls who swallow pills and drink rum. God’s too old to get down on his hands and knees and peer through the slats of boards. Glass broken long ago but shards still on the ground. He might cut his palms. If he ever thinks of me, maybe he’ll send his son.

  I never slept with the whiteman.

  I mean, I never lay down and closed my eyes.

  Clare said, There’s no reason to go home. She made me remember the trailer in December, a ring of Christmas lights blinking its outline, red and green and gold, the wet snow the first winter she was gone. She made me remember the white ruffled curtains on the windows and the three plastic swans in the yard. She said she hitched two hundred miles once to stand outside, to watch us inside, the fog of our breath on the glass. She said our mother had a new husband and two sons. She said we were nobody’s daughters. She said, They all want you to go.

  Singing Christians, pink nurse, rain — I waited, saw your blue truck at last. I had a dream once of your body, damp hair of your chest, my fingers in it. As soon as you stopped, I remembered the hunting cap on the seat between us, the rabbit fur inside your gloves.

  I surprised you. I’m the living proof: unknown father’s daughter. Tall bony Nadine. Dark-eyed Nadine. Girl from the lake of stumps. Water swirling in a mother’s dream. His face rising toward her. Shadow of a hand making the sign of the cross.

  I pulled the blanket from my head and you saw the holes in my ear — you counted the tarnished hoops, nine, cartilage to lobe.

  Later I’ll show you: the holes in my ear never hurt like the hole in my tongue.

  You were amazed by the space I filled — long legs, muddy boots; you had no reason to let the wet-wool, black-hair smell of me into your warm truck. Moments before, I looked small and helpless, a child on the road, no bigger than your own daughter, ten years old, her impossibly thin arms, all her fragile breakable bones.

  I closed my eyes so you wouldn’t be afraid. I was just a girl again, alone, but the smell — it filled the cab; you breathed me; I was in your lungs. I was your boyself, the bad child, the one who ran away from you, the one you never found.

  Later there was fog and dark, the rain, heavy. You didn’t know where we were going. You didn’t know where to stop. The lights of cars coming toward us exploded in mist, blinding you. I said, Pull over. I said, We can wait it out.

  And it was there, in the fog, in the rain, in the terrifying light of cars still coming, that I kissed you the first time. It was there parked on the soft gravel shoulder that I stuck my pierced tongue in your mouth and you put your hands under my shirt to feel my ribs, the first time. It was there that you said, Careful, baby, and you meant my tongue, the stud — it hurt you — and I thought of the handcuffs in my bag, stolen from the Halloween man, the last one, the white one — he was cursing me even now. I could have cuffed you to your wheel, left you to explain. I imagined myself in your coat, carrying your gun.

  But I loved you.

  I mean, I didn’t want to go.

  The rain slowed. The fog blew across the road. You drove. I wore your gloves, felt the fur of the animal around every finger. I stared at the lights till my eyes were holes.

  You were tired. You were sorry. It was too late to throw me out. You said we’d stop at a motel. You said we’d sleep. You said, What happened back there — don’t worry. You meant it wasn’t going to go any further. You meant you thought it was your fault.

  I disgusted you now. I saw that. Your tongue hurt. My sour breath was in your mouth. Never, you thought, not with her. Dirty Nadine. Nothing like my pretty sister. Pale half-sister. Daughter of the father before my father. Not like Clare, lovely despite her filth, delicate Clare, thin as your daughter — you could hold her down. You could take her to any room. You could wash her. You could break her with one blow. You would never guess how dangerous she is. You can’t see the shadows on her lungs, her hard veins, her brittle bones. You can’t see the bloom of blood. Later I’ll tell you about the handprints on all the doors of the disappeared. Later I’ll explain the lines of her open palm.

  Is she alive? Try to find her. Ask her yourself.

  Never is the car door slamming. Never is the key in the lock, the Traveler’s Rest Motel, the smell of disinfectant, the light we don’t turn on. Never is the mattress so old you feel the coils against your back when you fall. My tongue’s in your mouth. Your cock’s hard against my thigh. Never.

  Clare has a game. We strobe. She grabs my hand, sticks the wire in the socket. She dares me to hang on.

  I’m a thief. It’s true.

  I turn you into a thief. It’s necessary. You’ll think of that forever, the sheet you had to steal to get out of the motel. You’ll remember your bare legs in the truck, the cold vinyl through thin cloth, the white half-moon hanging in the morning sky, face down.

  Days now and hundreds of miles since I left you. You wear your orange vest, carry your oiled gun. You follow tracks in snow. I follow Clare to the road. She wants me to find her, to feel what she feels, to do everything she’s done.

  When you see the doe at last, you think of me. You’re alone with me — there’s no one you can tell about the girl on the road, her sore tongue in your mouth. Never, you said, no and no, but you twitched under her, blinded by the flickering in your skull. No one will understand. You thought her hands would turn you inside out, but you held on. There’s no one you can tell about the wallet she opened, the cash and pictures, the pants she stole.

  Careful, baby.

  I’ve got your life now — your little girl smiling in my hand, dressed in her white fairy costume, waving her sparkling fairy wand
; I hold your sad wife in her striped bathing suit. If I could feel, her chubby knees would break my heart. I’ve got you in my pocket — your driver’s license, my proof. I’m in your pants. I belt them tight. I keep your coins in my boots for good luck. I wear your hat, earflaps down. I bought a silver knife with your forty-three dollars. I carved your name in a cross on my thigh.

  Yesterday I found a dump of jack-o’-lanterns in the ditch, the smashed faces of all the men I used to know. They grinned to show me the stones in their broken mouths. They’ve taken themselves apart. I’m looking for their unstuffed clothes, hoping they didn’t empty their pockets before their skulls flamed out.

  It’s dark. Clare pulls me toward the gully. She wants me to run down between the black trees and twisting vines. She wants me to feel my way — she wants me to crawl.

  Morning again, I saw a deer, only the head and legs, bits of hide, a smear of blood, five crows taking flight, wings hissing as they rose. Someone’s accident butchered here, the stunned meat taken home. Before you fell asleep, I said, Anyone can kill.

  She’s in your sights. Nobody understands your fear, how you feel my hands even now, reaching for your wrists, slipping under your clothes. So many ways to do it, brutal or graceful, silent as the blood in my sister’s veins or full of shattered light and sound. Kick to the shoulder, blast of the gun — she staggers, wounded, not killed all at once. There’s snow on the ground, gold leaves going brown. There’s light in the last trembling leaves but the sun is gone. You follow her trail, dark puddles spreading in snow, black into white, her blood.