œ7#¹ýÔþŒýÏ Ï Ï Ï Ï Ï.ÌJÌJÌJÌJ ÌT@ÌîÌî,Ó¿xÌJÔ8 ÔXÔä*Ô¥Ï  ÔäÔnÔäÔäÔ¥+ÔäÔäÔäÔäÔäÔäthe rotten dog (continued further) chris king "He was getting ready to play piano." She frowned. "That piano is so out of tune and his one finger gone so stiff even this dog hates it when he plays! And Rocky don't always take to drink no more. Let's go to one of my little places, drink our beer, smoke a bone, let Rocky get tired of that piano and get all the piss and shit out of his dog. Then go back up and get him to play us some guitar! And who knows what all will happen then? But first, here." She took the plastic scoop and ran into the apartment basement, came back empty-handed. "I stashed it. I got my places. Where we are going, we can let the dog shit." We headed way down the street, past every kind of store, under train tracks, through hundreds of people hustling to their next stop or scrouging with an open beer. In this city, more than all the places dad had taken me, people use their feet. From Dana's place in Brooklyn to Rocky's I traveled mostly by subway but still walked probably a mile. I had long, strong legs and loved to stretch them, and needed time right then to think, but walking was keeping my two wounds open and chafed. And it was so hard to think with V around! "That whiteboy!" she was saying. "I got tired of my mother and got on a bus and said, well, how far away can I go? So I went to Washington! Way out West where I didn't know nobody! I wasn't homeless, not really, there were lots of us living like that and town kids like whiteboy with cars and money -- still in the womb, right? -- they would come party with us and shit!" She slapped me on the back -- missed the baby hatchet. "You ever been with a blackgirl?" That was a question I wanted more time to think about. "I never really had a chance." "See, you are my boy! This is New York City, right? Everybody live here, right? But people still stick to their own kind, most the time. I didn't have a whiteboy til Washington state. Then mostly just that one boy til I came back home." She wormed a beer out of the six pack I was carrying and dumped some down her throat without missing a walking beat. "Why did you come back home?" "Mama died." "Sorry." "Why? You didn't kill her. You didn't even know her. You can be thankful of that too." "Did you come home for the funeral?" I asked, and she cackled and said, "I came home to raise my baby sister but she grown now. Quit looking at me stupid. I might look young but I'm old. Don't ask how old. How old are you?" "I, um, I honestly don't know." "You too dumb to count?" "I can count. Though dad always says numbers aren't real." "That your dad I saw you with? That horny old guy with the beard?" I smiled. "I wish! That's Encyclopedic Bob Lovejoy, my dad's best friend when my dad still had friends. Bob believes in numbers. Bob believes in everything." "I been seeing him around here. Years now. Never met. See, I watch people, boy, I watch everybody. This is my place round here. I see everybody and I try to, I won't say know everybody, but I at least get to know if I want to know em." "Why did you pick me?" "Oooh!" She half-hugged me as we walked. "I don't give away all my secrets!" Now I wanted a beer; it felt good going down. I looked at my bottle and started to ask, but V said, "Don't fret cops here. I know enough of em. And we are almost to my favorite secret place. We passed other places not as secret already. But you my boy, I want you to feel comfortable!" "I never knew my mom," I blurted. "Sometime better that way. I never knew my dad. Never missed him." She kicked a beer can; it skidded past a cat too skinny to be alive, which ran sideways down the alley. I am not seeing too much else of this city street because I am walking with V and she has my attention almost in a spasm; if I took in much else I would collapse. "You ever have a baby?" I asked, then wished it unasked. "Give her up." She smiled. "She was beautiful. Little and brown. Whiteboy's baby. Had too much on my hands. Had to give her up. Whiteboy stayed in Washington." V tilted her beer, opened her throat, swished the leftover suds, tossed the bottle, zipped her jacket and dug her hands into her pockets, even the hand carrying the rotten dog's leash. "You virgin," she observed. That was something else I wanted more time to think about. "I, I, I had my chances." "Well, what are you waiting for?" My dad suddenly crowded my head. I saw him when he was King of Philadelphia, or so he thought, first starting to run with scum, drinking hard, slapping a loosely-made bed in the worst part of the city, his belt half-undone, grinning in my face. "Son God made woman too! The banjo is not the only thing He made that plays nice! Lay that banjo down and lay yourself down. But not beside it. Beside her!" But I was happier at night in a corner with the banjo. I never wanted to be with her -- she was always cake make-up, cigarette breath and whatever dad was drinking, a hoarse throat, eyes like piles of cow shit, clothes dad would insult in the morning light as filth. When she touched me, I felt like paper money -- old, used, sweaty, numbered, green. "Boyboy!" V was half a block behind me, waiting with the rotten dog while he arched his back. The dog finished his business and they caught back up. Watching V come up the walk, I memorized the way she moved, a certain flight in her step, birds in the legs, hesitation -- turtles -- at her hips, a restless cat's face sweeping all around her but eyes finally lighting on me. Black eyes. Black is the absence of light, Bob said. V's eyes were black light, a wet street at night. Or star scatters. "See!" she said. And now she put her lips to mine. Full lips, fully alive; she kept her mouth closed but she touched me for a long time. "I know! You were waiting for me!" She grabbed my hand. "We're here!" It was not what I had in mind. It was, in fact, nothing new. I thought we had passed many overhead train tracks like this on our way. I guess she could see my confusion, because she pulled me by the elbow. "Over here!" and we went down the wide median of the road -- a dingy road, not as well- traveled, though there were still some businesses around, I saw a sign for a Colombian deli -- where tall subway train trestles stood. She pulled me behind one, it looked like all the others, and all the sudden I was in a flood of V. My mouth was inside her mouth, which was big as the ocean. Though I have been in the ocean on both sides of this country and it tastes bad. V's mouth tasted sweet, chocolate and beer. And the ocean is usually slow, V's mouth swifter than the subway train barreling above our heads. I tried to open up and keep pace but I had no idea what to do so I quit ideas, imagined I was a baby in a basket in a flood and let her sweep me away. When I had relaxed, and you can relax in a flood if you let yourself, if you really don't mind drowning, then I opened my eyes. There was V's fantastic, sharp, brown face, bigger than the Manhattan skyline, more powerful than the statue of liberty, and then V grabbed my ass. I jumped, and she laughed inside my mouth but kept kissing me so I shut my eyes and went back to sleep at the bottom of the ocean. Her hands were sharks at my ass, eating my old man pants alive. I could feel the leash in her one hand and that damn rotten dog appeared in the middle of my dream and almost ruined it, because I could not be asleep in the ocean inside V's mouth if I was worrying about that rotten dog going back to work on my leg, so I cradled my arm not holding the beer -- very slowly -- around V's shoulders and tipped her enough to glance at the rotten dog. He was smiling on the cool, bare ground. I went back to sleep inside V's mouth, and surfed her tongue (you can surf in your sleep when you are dreaming inside a kiss). Still kissing -- we would breathe out our noses or sneak air darts into the sides of our mouths -- V eased my hand off her shoulder, held both my hands (squeezing her fingers with mine under the handle of the six-pack) and showed me how to kneel down at the bottom of the ocean during a hurricane, put beer beside a rotten dog-shark without waking it and reminding it it was dying, and slide down on your side on the cool, bare ocean bottom while picking broken glass out from under you. When we joined at the hips, another subway train exploded in the sky. And there was a banjo in my pants. V started playing my banjo. If we were wide awake in the light I think my tuning would have gone sour or string snapped, I might have squirmed, nothing would have worked, I would have been a luckless whiteboy cursed by his father, useless and alone til the end of his days, but V's secret place was dark and cool, a dream space in a blackgirl's kiss, and it seemed natural as playing "Bowling Green" to feel skinny, intelligent fingering at my private banjo neck, and then clawhammering in my pants, and then my banjo in the open air and V strumming up and down, up and down, up and down. You can let someone else play your banjo at the bottom of the ocean, silent while time roars. And then V placed my hand on the snap of her jeans and my dream was crumbling, that was something else I needed to think about, but I risked Bob's voice and it did not detroy our song by saying, "She will show you what she wants," so I let my hand be a little boy led through the dark by sure, strong hands, and the little boy fell into a deeper ocean, a boiling hot volcanic sea, not a cool place to dream but a burning place of birth and struggle, slippery mountains to climb, hot caverns where lava crawls down the walls. A boy could be burned alive there, turned to hot slop, noone ever know. V wanted her pants down, my hands helped her. V wanted my banjo inside her volcano, her hands helped me. You can play banjo inside a volcano at the bottom of the ocean. There is no place inside that song for anything but the fire and the tide, certainly no place to put Bob, my Dad, my baby hatchet, the rotten dog or the baby V had to give away, but they came in anyway. Bob said, "Protect yourself." My rubbers were unopened in the pockets of the pants around my ankles. My dad just showed up and hung around like a ghost with nothing good to do. My baby hatchet started rubbing the wound on my back open wider because the volcano kept spitting me up higher and higher and the ocean rocked me rough. The rotten dog woke up and started growling. And what if V got my baby? What would this whiteboy do? And that was why my dad was hanging around, because he would kill me for sure if my baby was brown. V wanted to keep boiling at the bottom of the ocean, no ghosts or dogs were bothering her, so I abandoned myself to her fire and tide. We burned and rocked away my worries, our breathing together growing louder until I forgot about self-protection, the fists of my father, steel in my flesh and the rotten dog growling and got lost in the hot flood. When I was about to boil over like when I was a boy in the corn, but this timr a burning star where my boyhood comes were corn kernels, V flamed lava from inside her and seized all of me she could get her hands on and squeezed. And then the dream was over. She felt my hatchet, screamed, jerked out from under me. The rotten dog bit me on the bare ass. Something basic in me came alive and there I was standing half naked, baby hatchet out of its back holster ready in hand, about to chop in half the snarling rotten dog. Until my eyes started to work again and I saw V howling like an abandoned baby curled around the rotten animal and I threw the hatchet away from me and collapsed on top of them both, crying and afraid, newborn, ready to die. The dog quit growling first. Then V relaxed her heaving and sobbing. My tears and shaking were the last to settle down. We quieted all together, V holding the rotten dog, me holding V, everyone breathing heavy but slowing some. My pain returned -- butt, back, leg, even banjo. And suddenly I wanted not to be naked in public anymore. "Get off of me," V said, and I jumped off and into my old man pants. When I turned back to V there she stood, naked except for an open shirt, my hatchet raised above her head and blood tracing a path down her arm. I held up my hands and said, "You cut yourself." She did not look. She just said, "I want to see how you like this" and chopped at the air. "It was instinct V and I never aimed at you." "I ain't doing this for my sake. I'm doing this for that rotten dog. I want to see how you like this." "You don't know how to handle that, V, put it down." She raised it higher, chopped it harder. "I been shown by boys badder than you how to handle weapons badder than this." "I wasn't me, V, I was you, I was somewhere deep inside you, and I felt this horrible pain and I did what an animal does, I defended myself." She smiled, though I did not know this smile. "I know where you were. And I know what animals do. And now I am showing you what really pissed off blackgirls do when their boy pulls something really fucking stupid." She lowered the hatchet and I felt breath rush into my lungs. "Don't hide weapons behind my back -- or behind your back," she spit at me. She looked at my baby hatchet in her hands and laughed. "And when you check your weapon with me, let it be better than this." There was history and strategy to that weapon but now was clearly not the time for all that. I nodded. "And get used to this rotten dog being a little jumpy around me. I been knowing this dog a long time, long time before he was rotten, back when Rocky was pretty rotten hisself, and I don't brag on myself much but this animal definitely would be dead today if I did not love it like it was my own." We both looked at it -- eyes shut in the shade. "I have taken on the dog, too," I said. "I love dogs and my daddy never let me keep one for long before he killed it or kicked it out of the truck. But that dog bit me on the butt! Right when I was where I wanted to be for a long, long, long time!" "Your dad killed your dogs?" "He's a long, story, V, and I ain't like him! I'm gonna be taking care of that rotten dog every time I come see Rocky. Until --" "Until nothing. Don't say it. Rocky ain't destroying this dog, no no." Finally she handed me the baby hatchet, blade first. I put my hand around hers on the handle, took the hatchet and looked for where her blood was coming from. "I hope I didn't hurt you," I said. She took her hand back and laughed. "Boy, you got to love me longer and harder than that to hurt me!" She sucked blood from the wound and spat it out. "See? Nothing. Deep cuts don't waste time bleeding. Let's see you, now." I pulled down my pants again and turned around and V laughed at my ass -- "Nothing rotten about that dog's teeth! Damn" -- until she saw my back. Then she got quiet and touched me so softly, so carefully, slowly tracing where I had been hurt, the way anybody in pain would like to be touched. She touched like she been knowing me a long time. My tears flowed again though I wished them dry. Would V carry on with a crybaby? "You an infection waiting to happen," she said. "We better get you back to Rocky's, clean you up." She spun me around. "You sure cry easy." Around a sob I said, "You cried first. Back on the street. When I saw you hugging the rotten dog." Those black eyes took on new light, two sad candles. As she opened her mouth to speak the subway exploded. It was something, I guess, she didn't feel like shouting so she shut her mouth and hugged me and I sobbed good then, not over pain, definitely not over the hatchet stab in my back. I was crying for all the girls I never got to know growing up alone with dad, starting with the one whose body was the first warm place I ever slept. But I could never imagine my mother long holding onto V, because V lit me up all over and pulled me into an ocean too deep for tears, too alive for crying. We were kissing again. She let the subway decide when the kiss was over. Once the train was gone, her mouth left me and she clapped her hands. "Come on Sweetie!" she said to the dog. "Let's go get daddy to play guitar!" "You hungry?" she asked me, heading back. "Yeah." "Cold?" "No." "In a hurry?" "Not really. My dad runs for the Jamaicans all night tonight. I'm sleeping at Dana's. She gave me a key." "Good. I know what I want to do then." She stopped at the Colombian deli, handed me the leash and came out with a bag and two coffees. We crossed back to the median and hunkered down against a different trestle. As we fixed up our coffees and V flared a joint, I checked out what kind of place it was I first made love. The trestle was rusty, covered with Spanish graffiti, surrounded by litter. Nothing about this to remember but V, and the rotten dog of course, who was devouring what looked like a jelly donut. "That a guava roll," V said when she handed me mine, with the joint. "You smoke?" "I, uh --" "Never done that either?" "My dad, uh ..." She shook her head and smoked again, drinking coffee while still holding her hit. "You got dad on the brain," she said, exhaling. "Boy when you gonna fly on your own?" I took in that thought with a bite of guava roll. "I would say I just did." She chewed and thought, smoked and chewed. The smoke did smell good. She blew her smoke at the rotten dog who seemed to roll in it too. "Your dad disapporove of you smoking yet he work for the Jamaicans?" "That's, that's business, his business, he cut me out of it from day one. He don't smoke it either." V sat with her legs wide open and I was not liking talking about my dad with V near me, opened up. So while she was smoking and chewing I said, "Am I the only one?" "Huh?" "Are there other boys?" She smirked and waved her hand in front of her face. "Is he the only one?" she said to the dog. "Whiteboy wants to know is he the only one. Go ask whiteboy if he help with my rent, if he help me with bills, if he help me with groceries, if he help me when I down, and then ask him if he the only one." She scratched the rotten dog and had to discard some bloody hair. I dug in my pockets. Banjo picks, then rubbers. "Should I have worn one of these?" I asked. "Boy you rude! Ask yourself next time! If there is a next time! Damn!" "I'm sorry V, I'm sorry," I said, getting my hand smacked away, "but I don't know what to do and I was told to do that and I didn't." Finally she accepted my hand. "Well," she said, "wait a few weeks. Your dick don't fall off, throw away your rubbers and come on back. I hate them fake fucking things." "What about babies." "He knows that much!" V looked at me, her face for a moment miserably old. "That will never happen to me again long as I live. And while we are on every unpleasant subject under the sun, may I ask you what you gonna do when the Jamaicans get your daddy killed? Or locked up where the sun don't much shine?" "He, he, he will, he will, he will make it out alright, me and Bob, Bob is working on him, we, we are gonna get him some honest work, it's, it's gonna work out, he's, he's just got to relax about a few things that are eating him up." We sat in silence, sipping coffees, far away from each other. I don't know where V was but I was figuring out how to say what my dad needed to hear without getting the shit kicked out of me. A subway car woke us to one another again. I put the rest of my guava roll in my pocket and started to gather the trash. "Boy," V said, standing up, "hang around here long enough and you start to see this whole city one big trash dump." But I still picked up the garbage and threw it away on our way home. "Who is Dana?" V asked me as we walked. "The place you stay." "Bob's daughter." "I never thought about it. I could ask. She's got a little girl who is home alot." "How is the place laid out?" "It's all one big room really." "Then we stick to my places til it gets real cold." "So you want to see me again?" "Whiteboy don't know how I work," she told the dog. "When I make friends, I keep them for awhile. It a whole lot easier keeping what you got then starting over every day. I even spent money on you!" she said, finger playfully in my face. "Thank you," I said, trying to snuggle as we walked, but she pulled away. "We close now. He be comin home from workin." "Your boyfriend?" "He pay the rent." "You make love to him, V?" She smiled and shook her head like I was stupid. "Do you love him?" "He been good to me." "He know you, you know, other guys?" She smiled and shook her head. "You ruining this," she said and strayed away. I closed the gap and almost stepped on the rotten dog. "Well I don't know how to do any of this and none of it is very easy!" I almost shouted. "Maybe I like that about you, but find things out for yourself!" The tall apartment towers felt like they were falling down around me now, and all my pains returned as V drifted away from me on the sidewalk. She wasn't even checking to see if I was keeping up as I dropped behind, limping again. I caught up only because the dog started spraying familiar items as we neared Rocky's place, slowing V down. When we were back in the courtyard, V handed me the leash. "You can always find me," she said and turned away. "What about Rocky playing guitar for us? We got one more beer!" She held it up. "I got one more beer. Rocky's woman home. I seen her car. That bitch hate the sight of me." "Can I call you?" "No. Just come find me. Any time. You still my boy." I wanted to kiss her but she was moving farther away and I guessed we would never get to kiss good-bye the way things stood. The closer we would get to our place of parting, the farther away we would always become. So I waved and she said, "Get that rotten dog in his medicine bath," and disappeared into the basement of her building. more of that rotten dog "What about Rocky playing guitar for us? We got one more beer!" She held it up. "I got one more beer. Rocky's woman home. I seen her car. That bitch hate the sight of me." "Can I call you?" "No. Just come find me. Any time. You still my boy." I wanted to kiss her but she was moving farther away and I guessed we would never get to kiss good-bye the way things stood. The closer we would get to our place of parting, the farther away we would always become. So I waved and she said, "Get that rotten dog in his medicine bath," and disappeared into the basement of her building. I knocked loud on Rocky's door. Finally a woman shrilly cried, "THE DOOR, ROCKY!" The peephole darkened and then Rocky was talking to me while he opened the door. "That rotten dog run you all over town?" he was asking, flashing smiles and rolling the dog on the carpet, who just drooled with pleasure then fell immediately asleep. "Thought maybe he got you lost, hoo hoo, he do like to run, he got some life in him yet, I been tellin that vet that too though Dr. Gizmo believe anything keep my money pourin in." Once he quit fussing with the rotten dog, he fell silent. "Boy you look awful. Who beat you up?" "I got some explaining to do, Mr. -- Rocky --" "This is no terrible part of town," he muttered. "Tell me what happened?" Rocky turned around while I was working up something. His lady friend stood in the hallway, plump, dressed in rumpled office clothes. "This your new little friend, Rocky?" "And look that rotten dog already drug him into a fight!" he said sharply, and she yelped. "It wasn't a fight!" I yelled. "The dog took off running faster than I expected for such a rotten little dog and I ran to catch up, stepped on him, he bit me in the leg and I fell down and cut my back on the baby hatchet I carry." "So it was all the dog?" the woman asked. "Well, I stepped on him first." "Nothing to report to the police?" she asked. "No no no." "Then I'm goin back to bed. Rocky, fix him up. Make yourself at home. I'm Wanda." Her smile was dazzling, actually. I got a flash of Rocky first sneaking around with her behind his wife's back in a smoky nightclub thirty years ago. "I'll start a hot bath for ya." She turned and the chugging sound of running water followed. "You say he just really lit off out of here?" Rocky snickered. "Really had you running so crazy you stepped on him?" Rocky giggled. "Off with that shirt, now. I was a military man. I know wounds." "Were you in a war?" I asked, peeling off my shirt, which did look like a bloody, filthy disaster. "My dad woulda gone to Korea but he crushed his leg in the mine." "It's the people that didn't go that end up doin all the talkin about it." Rocky took my shirt. "This ain't fit for a dog rag now. I ain't got a thing to fit ya either. Your clothes all back in Brooklyn? We should start keeping a set here." He snapped his fingers. "I know! Get in the tub. Or wait! Let's see that hatchet now." He helped me take off the holster. My chest was about even with his eyes. "You been boozin?" he whispered. "Don't apologize! I was at your age! Just don't let that" -- he pointed back down the hall -- "know, she think I provided and drank right along with ya. I give it up!" He pointed mournfully at his stomach. "When I get hot at cards or the music and slip and drink one, like somebody strung me all inside with barb wire." He had the hatchet in his hands now. "You carve this yourself?" "My dad has one just like it. We got the same name." He looked up from the hatchet blade. "Hope he pack bigger heat than this now with the company he keepin." "I, I really don't think so, we, we were always strictly against guns and most everything mechanical. It was always the old ways for us, the old old ways, that's why I carry me this hatchet, or started to, I grew up on game. Road game! We hunted off the sides of the road." Rocky set the hatchet down. "You keep talking and I keep holding that and I will have to go skin me a rabbit.. And round here couldn't catch nothing but a cat!" "I seen squirrels down there," I said. "Ssssh! Don't GET me dreaming. We're in the city now. See, she" -- hallway -- "she just as country as me but she don't like to claim it. I bring a bloody squirrel up here and, Woop! No hot food or wet pussy for a week!" "I can cook real good." "Shut up! Now show me this back wound." I figure he was about eye level with it. "It's not pretty. Hold still." He came back with rubbing alcohol and began to clean the wound. I can always disappear when I know pain is coming, so I did, then tuned back in just as Rocky was saying, "I don't see why it won't heal but not with that hatchet rubbing against it." I didn't say nothing; nobody was going to stop me from wearing my baby hatchet. "Now how about that dog bite?" I bared my leg, and Rocky laughed from the gut, so hard it turned into a cough, a long, nasty, evil cough that roused Wanda and sent us all to the commode to stand around Rocky while he spit up clots of blood. "Easy, Rocky, doctor told you about laughing!" "God damn it woman!" he coughed out. "Doctor told me about music," cough, "about laughter," cough, "about liquor," cough, "about smoking." He held the rim of the toilet and sucked air. "I'm gonna die living not live dead." "I'm not helping that man," she said, and walked out. Then put her face in with another beautiful smile. "Don't let him talk your bath water cold." I helped Rocky up and he teetered to his own bedroom. Behind Wanda's door, I heard the idiot, big and loud. Rocky sat on his bed, gasping, then fumbled with the dial of his idiot until he found some good old boy in a cowboy hat crooning about his darling, then he smiled. "Water, Little Big," he said hoarsely, "water and a smoke." I came back with both. "This," he said, pointing to the idiot though naturally I tried not to look, "this is what I like. The country and western." He drew back into bed, propped up against a pile of pillows. "Oh you can clean that dog bite yourself. That dog's mouth is cleaner than yours or mine. But boy he sure can --" he held up a hand -- "don't get me started again. I laugh myself to death. But you know. You found out. Didn't you? You know what that rotten dog can do!" Sliding into that hot bath was like plunging into V all over again. The thought made the banjo between my legs bob up out of the sudsy water, ready to play. Her sharp face, skinny strong legs -- opened to me for the first time -- everything on her hot, moist and open to me -- for the first time -- black eyes lit with love candles -- and Wanda had candles lit in the bathroom for me ... I went under the water and held my breath. It was like V down there too. Then burst up out of the water thrilled with myself, grateful that the world let me in, that I was allowed to join the great motion of people on the face of the earth! I stood up in the bathtub, almost running in place like the athlete I never got to be because I never went to school and my dad hates balls, pumping my fists in the air. I met a girl! A girl who likes me! And she let me in! I know what it's like! I am alive! I slipped, but didn't bust my head open. Foolish feeling, I dropped back into the warm water. V was with me in the foam, her dark brown skin showing against the white suds, Oh God, soap bubbles slipping down a brown body, a pretty brown body that let me in! V would not go away, my banjo would not calm down, I worried that I would have to settle it down myself in Rocky's bathtub with people in the house. I went underwater again and held my breath. When I came back into oxygen, things were changing again. Wanda was knocking on the door. "Phone for you. Bob. Says it's urgent." For a horrible moment I thought Wanda was coming in with me naked and ready for love like that and covered with dog bites. "I'm going back to bed," she said. "The phone will reach the tub. Cover yourself and come get it." I waited a minute and, calmed down between the legs for sure, dashed out for the phone. Rocky was singing and playing guitar in his bedroom. "Bob!" I said, a little breathless back in the tub. With my toe I got some hot water trickling. "How you doin, Larry?" "Look Larry, can you get ready to go?" "Go where, Bob? I'm in the bathtub. Rocky is playing guitar again. Come on over!" "Larry, I'm up in Boston at the shop. You need to get to Dana's. Right away, Larry." "She said take my time. Subways run all night and I got a key." "Larry, listen to me! It's your dad." The bath was over. Pain was back. The floor was cold under my feet. "Is he in trouble?" "Well, yes and no, Larry. Just go to Dana's and see." "What, Bob!" "He's drinking again, Larry. Drinking and making a mess." "You coming down, Bob?" "I am trying to get out of here, but I need somebody to cover the shop. Friday nights are good nights for me, Larry. None of us are prepared for this." "Well, she's -- uncomfortable. It will be a lot better when you're there. Your dad is really carrying on about seeing his baby boy." I was starting to picture the scene. "It's not going well with the Jamiacans," I thought aloud. "Just move! Speculate later. Call me when you get there, Larry, I got a customer. And remember! He needs you. Don't be afraid." I got dressed, all but my ragged shirt, and knocked on Rocky's bedroom door. I was surprised to hear Wanda yell, "Come in!" She was curled around Rocky and Rocky was curled around the guitar. He looked up at me and sang, "Now you know, yes you know, found out didn't you? Yes you know what this rotten dog can do! Now you know it's true, I come home to you and now you know what this rotten dog can do!" He quit singing and, as he worked out the guitar figure, nasty, nasty, nasty blues, he winked and said, "See, Little Big? You got bit and I opened my mouth then turned on these country western boys, stole a chord from them and now we got a song!" The guitar part crawled like an evil snake. "Play it nasty, Rocky," Wanda said, moving the bed with the rhythm Rocky was bringing out of her body. "You know, don't you? Yes you do. I found you blue, bloody and blue but I came back to you and now you know what this rotten dog can do. I can bite and stay out all night, I can even howl at the moon!" He opened up to howl, caught a cough before it came, never howled. So the guitar howled instead. "Rocky," I said, then again, louder! Wanda thumped him. He looked up from his smoking cigarette and howling guitar, a young man with a new song in his mouth and a warm woman in his bed. "Get gone now," he said. "You, uh, said I could borrow a shirt." "There's a box of em by the door." I followed his nod and picked out an extra large. Every shirt had a picture of Rocky and his name in huge blue letters. "Get gone now," he said. "Come back some other time." When I closed the door, Wanda was moaning to the guitar, a low, soul-bottoming moan. I stepped past the rotten dog, so tired it was sleeping right through daddy's guitar, pulled on my coat and set out for Brooklyn singing Rocky's song. Walking up the stairway to Dana's apartment I heard echoes of my daddy's laughter, and singing died in my throat. You know a drunk dad by his laughter -- sloppy, too loud and too long, laughter unshared. As I summoned all my breath and courage, I took in odors from the hallway, someone preparing spicy soup, a corner where a bum or dog had pissed, my own soap bubble smell and on my coat something of V, her hair or something she puts in her hair that smells slightly smoky. V gave me strength; she could kick my daddy's ass! I unlocked the door and walked in quickly. Dana's exhausted eyesyes stared from across the room; my dad, sprawled in the chair opposite her at their little table, had to swing around to see me. Doing so pitched him on the floor. He was still laughing. "Let me tell little Larry," he roared from the floor, crawling to his knees, "boy you gotta hear this one!" Dana smiled painfully. I could smell coffee in the room. "Your dad has been relieving himself about his new coworkers," she said. "She means I been pissin on them island niggers!" He flattened out on the floor and laughed some more. "I thought the porch niggers of Kentucky were a ssssomething!" he said, sitting up. His suit was a mess. "But you know what these island niggers call me? 'Brother from Another Mother'!" He roared laughter, slobbering between his legs. "'Brother from Another Mother'! If MY mama had lived to hear niggers from Jamaica call her boy 'brother' and hear reference to her come out of their thick lipped black mouths ..." As his body rippled with giggles, I saw how fat he was becoming. His clean shave stood out oddly given what bad shape he was in. When his last giggle died, Dad rolled his head back and looked at me from the bottom of his eyes. "Take off your coat, boy, stay awhile." "Pa, I think Dana might like it if we hit the road. Courtney probably coming home soon." "Courtney is staying with the NIGGER girl down the hall," she said with an evil eye for dad. "The home country nigger." "Negro," Pa said, eyes closed, head rolled back, right hand in the air. "I can switch to 'Negro' if I am starting to" -- he giggled the last word -- "offend anyone. It's just, Dana" -- he crawled slowly up the wall and leaned over the table at her; Dana didn't budge -- "I got to be SO good working with these people! It's worse than a Union mine! I got to be so damn nice nice nice to my brothers from other mothers!" he collapsed back in the chair with a snicker. "More coffee, Dana?" he asked in a childish voice. I was shaking my head no but she got up and went to work on it. "Dad I don't think you're driving tonight --" He pounded the table. "Ask your dad how he is before you tell him what to do!" "I can tell you how you are, Pa," I said, still standing at a safe distance. "You're drunk as a monkey that fell in the punch." Dana stiffened at the sink. Pa spread his palms flat on the table and cocked his head at me. "And you are the smartest ass that ever shit between two shoes." I laughed, in spite of everything. "Like that, Larry? Your old man make a funny? Come here, boy." "Don't pinch me or nothin, Pa, I got roughed up today." "What happened, son? Tangle with some New York City NEGRO?" "I got bit by a dog I stepped on and fell funny on my hatchet." "Ow!" Dana said, turning to me. "Are you OK?" "Just a little raw and sore. Too sore for his hugs. Pa plays rough with me." His arms were still open for the hug. "I do reserve that right," he said. "I made this boy. I am still working on him. The tides of creation do not always crash gentle on the shifting shore. Sometimes we pound the clay into shape. Hug your daddy." "Let me take off my baby hatchet." I lost my long old man's coat, put my hatchet holster down next to his on the table, kneeled beside his chair and held my breath for a hug. I hated gin smell. "It's hard working alone," he said, crushing my face and neck to his shoulder. "I miss you son. You're my boy. You're a smart boy too, Larry. I wish I could let you in on this. But this is my hustle. My baby. But it's hard working with these niggers." He sighed so deep the stink reached me through my mouth, where I was breathing. I let him hold me a decent spell longer then pried away and said, "We could always go back to books. Or carnival supply, Pa. I could help you there. You could stay away from, um, black people thataway and we could come to the city for museums all the time like the old days when I was little." I felt Dana's sideways smile from the sink and returned it. We had met in those days and she was good to me and we both knew it. My dad just laughed again and shook his head. "I raised you right, I sure did, but you ain't keeping up with me, boy. Those were baby steps. I'm running with the big dogs now. The big black dogs now. I just wish I could tell you more about it." Dana appeared above us, pouring coffee into his cup; I took the interruption to get up and away from him into a chair of my own. "I want you to tell me why," Dana said sharply, joining us at the table. "Why are you messing around with this? My dad thinks you are crazy." He laughed again and scratched at his fat belly through two bulged open shirt buttons. "I love your dad, Dana." He opened his eyes. "Do I not love her daddy?" "We all love Bob," I agreed. "We're all family here." Dad clasped his hands; I noticed he was wearing a ring I had never seen before. "But I tell ya he is with the dope just like he was with the hookers. I know, little lady, you might not like hearing that." "My dad never succeeded in hiding anything from me," she said. "Well what was there to hide? When you get down to the hard hustle, the real deal, your dad is a -- dabbler. He's a tourist. He buys a hooker. He buys a little dope. Oh he impresses his fast friends like me with the down and low folks he knows, but he ain't down in the shit where the flowers grow. I get down to grit. I do. I worked hookers and now I work dopers. I am where it happens. I make it happen." He had leaned forward and was pointing at Dana. She didn't flinch. "I don't give a shit about the shit you make happen," she snapped. "But I look over at this young man and wonder how much longer he can keep a straight head and still be stepping around all your bullshit." "Larry!" "Pa?" "Did my hooker friends harm you?" "No, Pa." "And how long did that last?" Dana asked. "My dad said that fell apart on you pretty fast and you were lucky to get out in one piece." "Open to interpretation," he said, showing his palms. They were not clean. "Open to interpretation. What to the outside might look like a ruined business on the inside may in fact be a move to a new, better, more prosperous line of work. My point is your dad has always been on the outside." "You're right Lane. Running dope really has it over pimping. You are growing fast. Flowering in the shit." She drank her coffee like it was a smack in his face. "Why thank ya, pretty darlin! I am proud too. I am performing a public service. Dope destroys those stupid enough to stick it in their bodies. Weeds out the idiots. I am proud to help further stupify the stupid people on this planet and hasten them to a place in the ground where they will stop breathing my air and eating my food. That is better than making wet dick for the lonely man. I have grown. I am proud. And I am gonna make this little boy here proud too. Larry!" "Yeah Pa." He paused. Longer. He wanted me to look at him. I did. His eyes looked like filthy beds. "We're really putting it over Eldon now." I tried to nod. "We are, Larry. We're really putting it over Eldon now. We are moving at last into our place in the sun. You wait. At the end of this hustle you and me will be belly up in the tropical sun with island niggers bringing us chalices of ice cold gin and chop suey served on plates of solid gold. That damn cement truck driving faggot of a golfer Eldon will still be chasing down his little balls watching his back thinking I am coming to get him or that he really put it over those ignorant Kentucky hicks when don't you know we'll just be on a shadier side of easy street drinking whiskey with our wine." Dad's giant hands were choking the steam above his coffee. I did not know what to say and Dana had probably never heard of Eldon and most likely didn't care to learn now. In the silence the old man stared at my chest. "Boy you got a nigger on your shirt," he said, pointing. I said, "What?" and looked down. Just as Rocky's face materialized upside down in my eyes and the idiocy of wearing that in front of my old man registered in my mind he had pounced across the table, swept me off my chair and rolled me across the floor with his hands clawed into my shirt, ripping it away from my skin and taking some flesh with it. I cried out surprise and pain as we thumped into the kitchen counter. Old wounds burst open in my flesh and all my bones rattled. Something heavy fell from above beside us, shattering. Then my old man cried a hideous yell. His hands unclutched my shirt and grabbed his bad leg, the one he crushed in the mine. I rolled out from under him, jumped to my feet face to face with Dana, whose mouth was opened wide for a scream that never came. My baby hatchet quivered in her raised arm. We both looked up at the hatchet and she dropped it at my dad's feet. He was howling like an animal smashed half dead on the road. I had seen my dad crush the skulls of many animals in that condition and skin them out quick. I kicked away the hatchet and dropped to his side. He was trying to pull down his pant leg, which was dark purple with blood. My hands helped his until I pulled away with a thick piece of glass stuck into my palm, but not deeply. It barely bled either. Then I understood my dad's screams. "My whiskey bottle." He had shattered the gin bottle in his pocket. His pants down now below the thigh, blood flowed pretty fast as he clawed out the larger hunks of glass his fat weight plus mine had packed into his leg. With his giant hands on the wounds I did not know what to do with mine so I watched frozen as my dad bled and howled and clawed. Then Dana was edging me gently aside and leaning over him, telling him to shut up and stop squirming and let her see the extent of the damage. I crawled on my hands and knees as far away from my bleeding dad as I could get. Every motion of muscle hurt me. I tried to lay down against the far wall but my back was a field of pain. I wanted to sit down but the dog bite on my ass was throbbing. So I lay on my side and curled up. My dad was only breathing heavy now, with occasional sharp cries as Dana did something painful that helped because after each cry he breathed better. My lips were on my knees. My chin got wet from my shirt -- red. My blood or my father's blood on Rocky's face. I closed my eyes. I wanted to be far away when my dad came out of pain but it would hurt to run right now. So I asked V to come into my mind and play with me the way little kids play. Play with me on that playground I built in my mind when I was alone on the road with my dad and never knew many other kids. That place where little kids touch hands to hands, pat their own laps, cross their hands and touch them again and where it was a secret, deep as any ocean, to kiss. Across the field, in that wind that blows across secret childhood kisses, a small brown girl is calling my name and calling my name because she wants me to come play with her. And I know how to play with girls without hurting them or making them angry. Soft hands on me: I open my eyes: The playground is all broken glass and the feet of my father behind Dana's face. Can I stand? Walk? Am I bleeding? Can I answer my name? Is this my blood or my father's blood? I was scaring Dana by being hid away inside my mind so my mind waved good-bye to V, little, brown and disappearing farther and farther below me. There was too much broken glass. Did my head break the windshield again? But we are not in the truck. I am on Dana's floor and she is scared for me and holding me. I crawled to my knees and stood up for her. She stood with me and held out my hands, lifted up my shirt, pulled it off, walked me in a circle and stung my flaming back with love and medicine. Then she was hugging me, her hands avoiding my places of pain, her enormous soft boobs against my bare belly. As I rested in her love, my dad growled, I alone could understand what he was saying: I am the one bleeding to death not him put him down and help me, help me. I looked over Dana's shoulder from far away on my fat dad lying in his underwear on the floor, surrounded by too much glass for one broken gin bottle and pieces of fruit everywhere, fruit and some sort of thick, gooey lava. Dana's warmth left me and she ripped my Rocky shirt in half, told my dad to shut up, he wasn't going to die, then she tied the shirt halves around his leg. She held his hands away and really stared at the wounds. "Do you think you need to go the hospital?" "No no no no!" Dad hated hospitals and all places that keep files on people. "Then shut up and you can sleep here. I suggest sleeping on your back with that leg above your heart. And wait til you're sober until you pick out the little pieces of glass." He shut up and lifted his leg, with a muted squeel of pain, onto a chair the she pushed over to him. "It's tight here so just sleep where you fell. I don't know what we will do about pants for you." He moaned something about clothes down in the trunk of his car. "Good. We'll get them before Courtney comes home in the morning." Then she started cleaning up the fruit mess. When I went to help her, she said, "Rest, Larru. On your side." So I lay on my side and watched her. "Dana, why all the gooey little pieces of fruit?" She sighed. "Your hotheaded NIGGER-hating father just wasted three months of work. You ferment fruit and make the most delicious liquored cake icing. I make it for my birthday every year. It takes months. It was almost ready." She turned to my dad with a scooper full of it; I had to crane my neck to watch. "It's booze, Lane, want it? Just pick out the pieces of glass. From the fruit or from your shit on the other end, take your pick." He waved at her like she was a fly. I knew that wave. That was the response to most of the questions I asked him when he was drinking. He would sleep soon. "Sigger!" Now that things had quieted, their cat appeared from wherever cats go when they smell trouble. I pulled her to my chest but first she had to inspect the new messes in town. My dad bored her. One sniff and he was history. The fermented fruit was more to her liking. She patted her paw in the goop and licked it off until Dana swatted her with the broom. "Don't you get into the glass act. I don't want to pump no cat stomachs on top of everything else." The phone rang and Sigger skipped away to nowhere. "Oh hi, Dad," Dana said, sinking down on the couch. "Yes, we're all here." She produced a cigarette -- I thought she was quitting since by Courtney suddenly renamed their cat after mom's pet name for smokes. "Settling in, I would say, for sleep. I know, It is early." She smoked. "But it's been a long day for us all." She looked over at my dad. "Harmless enough now. His Jamiacan brothers might mistake him for a damaged client at the moment." She laughed. "And little Larry, he's -- oh! Just a minute." She leapt up and rummaged in her chest of drawers. A sweatshirt landed on me. Dana was short but with her huge boobs, it fit me, just the sleeves were short. "I left him shirtless for a moment," she told her dad. "We're all set now." All the sudden I realized she had been chewing gum the whole time. "I don't know, wait. Lane? You up for talking to my dad?" He groaned and gave the yes version of his wasted wave. I could hear my dad getting spit ready for talking while she walked the phone over. "Encyclopedic Bob!" my dad said thickly. "(Are you OK alone?)" Dana asked. "(No problem)," I said. "(Be right back. I'm gonna check on Courtney.)" She slipped out. "I'm alright, Bob, just a little, well, a little, just a little fatigued. In fact I have been drinking. Had. Oh a little gin. Celebrating, you know. A good day. I'd have to speak in code to elaborate, I doubt you could follow. Just a good day, pocket full of green and needing to see my kid. That's all. Get back in touch with him. I'm working, he's, well, he's got all these distractions in this big city I don't, I don't want him to stray too far from me." I could see him trying to include me out of the tops of his eyes from across the floor. "I don't even know too much about the company he's keeping with this new arrangement. Everything is new, Bob, we just have to work out new ways for new days. Dana sure is good to him though. We appreciate that. Though I think I, maybe I scared her tonight. Well you know Bob, you and me, we're country people and here you raised her up there in that city and she has different ideas about, well, discipline for one and, well, probably colored people for another. But we'll compromise over here. We'll get through. Soon enough, everything will change. Me and Larry will be together and not working together either. I see big money, retirement money, and I see it soon. I can't elaborate without code. I will say we got new partners. Well I think you would call them Nigerians. I say home country niggers. They got it together though. Good, slick, tight hustlers and they got a better product, it better serves the public, the best idiot medicine they devised besides war and hell, Bob, war is a mess." He was warmed up enough to laugh at himself. "Now you don't have to tell me that. I'm way down deep inside this situation, Bob, you'll have to trust me. Someday we'll be sitting in me and Larry's yacht over gin and lemonade and I will you the whole story. For now, trust me. Well, now I did mean to get up there tonight but work was so good down here I thought, play this through, fill your pocket then stay in the big city with the boy a day or two, do the old time stuff, museums, maybe even head out to Coney Island, hell who knows? Look up that Red Jew if he is still kicking. He is? Well that's nice. We will look him up. Well, Bob, let me put on little Larry and let y'all go. I'll be up there with a shipment in -- within a week. I'll have the new product too. Be lookin forward to it. Put a good book or two aside for us. An oldie. You know what I like. Alright. Boy?" I crawled over and reached for the phone. "You love your dad?" he whispered. "I guess, Pa." "You better." "Hi, Bob," I said, crawling with the phone. "Yeah, big day. I'll tell ya later when it's not long distance. When you coming down? Really? That would be great! Yeah. It's, it's, it's really good for me around here. I, I like the new arrangement except for not seeing Pa and worrying, you know, about Pa." He asked about V and I said, "Like I said, it's really, really working out good for me and I'll tell you all about it when I get to Boston. OK. Dana's not back yet. She went down the hall to say good night to Courtney. OK, will do. Bye, Bob" and I hung up. "Now I would have said bye to that old man," dad said. "And what's this about Boston? You know we're not traveling together for the time being, ESPECIALLY not to Boston." Dad thought, burped. "We'll take care of that." Burp. "But I like the idea. Together in Boston again! We'll look up some of the old girls." With V still practically there on my own body that was a sick thought, but dad must never know about V and I know how to fake it with hookers so I said, "That sounds good, dad." "And what's this big day you have to tell about?" "You know, Pa, we, we'll catch up in the morning. It's nothing big, you know. New neighborhoods, sights and sounds, new ideas for the banjo." "The banjo! Shit! Play your daddy to sleep, son, like the old days, come on, boy, play it perty." It hurt to sit up but it was hard to say no. Plus I had new ideas and Sigger liked the banjo and I missed her. I got my banjo out from under the bed and carefully plucked from my pockets banjo picks but no rubbers -- I could throw them away now; V would never make my dick fall off, just grow and bloom and explode with stars -- and played my daddy the "Short Life in Trouble." But quiet: neighbors. Thick and tunless, Dad sang along, "A few more words and part. Short life in trouble and a boy with a broken heart." Dana came in and I stayed on the instrumental turnaround to ask if I was too loud or it too late. "No," she said, "sounds good. Courtney -- oh I should let you play." "Go on," I encouraged, and she said, "It was all I could do to keep Courtney from running down here and sleeping on your chest! But it's still a little bit of a horror show down here." She nodded at Dad. "Hell," he said, having heard her, "we coulda made up a story, say I fell on that broken fruit jar somehow. I like that little girl of yours." Dana didn't respond. She just shook my knee good night and started dropping blankets on people, then hit her little bitty bathroom to do her thing. 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