33 Snowfish (5 page)

I don’t mind taking someone out back and putting a smile on his face if he’s got something thick in his billfold. But when some hole-in-the-wall bus driver starts farting like that you can forget it. I put up with enough.

Like I said before, the thing I got going with Boobie goes beyond arms and legs and the skin on a hand. When me and Boobie do it, it’s different. Because it’s slow and quiet and it makes me cry. And no one’s ever done me
that
cold-blooded before. My job is one thing and my heart is another. Tricking’s like being a waitress or sacking groceries. It puts money in your purse. And when that money gets thick, things are usually okay. And you don’t have to answer to no one if you don’t have a pimp and I don’t have one and I don’t plan on tricking for one, either.

Most pimps wind up either knocking your teeth out or stealing all your money. You have to go solo if you want to get ahead in any real way.

Tricking’s better than living in one of those Rockdale juvy hotels, that’s for sure. In those Rockdale juvy hotels all they do is steal your clothes and burn you with cigarettes. And the supervisors who run them don’t ever let you out if you don’t have parents. And they feed you less and less so you don’t ever get to grow up right, and for the rest of your life you just wind up being mostly a kid.

Those Rockdale juvy hotel supervisors know that stuff, too. It’s not like they’re trying to
help
you.

When I turn sixteen I’ll probably start working a club like this one on the east side of Joliet called Harmony. It’s late hours and it kills the peaches in your cheeks, but the money’s solid. I know some girls who bring home two hundred a night doing this thing called lap dancing. All you have to do is rub up against some college boy for a minute while he sits in a chair. You wear high heels and some booty floss and that’s it. It’s easy work. From what I hear you just walk around and when you start to feel someone’s eyes on you — like one of them nervous suburban boys from Lewis University or the College of St. Francis — you offer him a dance. It costs him twenty dollars and he usually pulls the money right out of his pocket. The cool thing is that by law he’s not allowed to touch you. But he wants to, that’s for sure. And the longer he stays the more he pays.

Harmony has these big security guards, too, just in case one of those college boys gets out of hand.

My girl Dee lap danced at Harmony for a while. She made so much money she moved to Crown Point, Indiana, and started taking these correspondence courses so she could get a degree in administrative office management. I haven’t heard from Dee in the longest but I’ll bet she’s doing real good.

I would lap dance just to make some profits because there’s always the future to plan. Once me and Boobie and Custis get settled, we’re all going to marry each other.

My Aunty Frisco used to say that if you don’t have a priest or a judge or a ship captain you can still marry someone by jumping over a broom. That would be cold-blooded, all three of us jumping the broom like that. I’ll get a white dress with some lace on it, and I know Custis will pick me a sunflower.

That’s a ways off yet, though.

That’s a long ways off.

Yesterday in this town called North Caledonia I saw Boobie’s picture in the paper. Custis read some of it to me. He had to use his finger and he couldn’t get all the bigger words right, but part of it said that the Joliet police are hunting Boobie for what he did to his parents. It also said that Boobie’s real name is Darrin Flowers. Custis is scared but I keep telling him that the police don’t have anything on him. They don’t have anything on me, either.

It was smart of Boobie to disguise the car, though. He used about eight bottles of black spray paint that Custis stole from the True Value hardware store in Lockport.

Boobie got mad because I got lifted from all the paint fumes, but it wasn’t like I was trying to. I just got what I could get from the air.

Boobie stole a pair of license plates from the parking lot at Mercury Cinemas, too. He scratched one of the letters off so the highway police can’t track them. Now the Skylark looks like it got burped out of a volcano.

So the baby keeps grabbing at my tits and Boobie expects me to name him something that rich people would like.

I keep telling Boobie that rich people are just going to come up with one of their own names anyways. That’s the thing about rich people: They have so much money they can buy their own rules. That’s how politics work. If you got enough money you can win elections and stuff.

But I have enough to worry about. Like those blackbirds are all flying south and my arms keep itching and if I don’t turn another trick we’re going to run out of money.

Boobie’s not crazy about me working right now but he knows it’s the only way we’ll get by.

Sometimes when things go quiet in the car and all you can hear is the four of us breathing, I get to thinking about my Aunty Frisco.

Before I moved in with Boobie and Custis she started throwing her china at me because I wouldn’t come home at night. And after she broke her whole collection and didn’t have anything else to throw she started locking her lungs until she would faint and fall out of her power chair. And the day before I left she took the broom and rolled over to me and tried to sweep under my feet, and if that happens you’ll catch a curse so bad that no one will ever want to marry you. So I
had
to leave after that.

I can still see her all stuffed in her power chair, angry about the Cubs losing, shaking and speed-fiending and locking her lungs and cursing at those social workers who used to come and check up on us.

Sometimes I don’t know how I got mixed up with Boobie. I mean, I love him and I love Custis, too, even though he’s dirty and foolish and a nasty little hooligan most of the time. I guess I’m just afraid of what’s going to happen. Because you can’t run forever. There’s only so much pavement that the road makers lay down. After a while, the highway quits going north and it just turns into the sky. And you can’t go anywhere in the sky unless you have a plane or some kind of rocket.

My Aunty Frisco used to say that if you walk through a wheat field on the first day of May you will meet your fate.

In Bolingbrook there’s nothing but parking lots and little short buildings, but on the first day of May, I went to the Jewel and bought some Chex cereal because it has wheat in it and I went behind the Fun Shop and spread it on the ground and sat on top of it all day. That’s when things were clean and my arms were pretty. That’s when my eyes were so big you could draw them.

Some birds came and tried to eat that Chex cereal, and I heard a fire truck go by, but other than that nothing special happened. I just sat there, waiting.

And when the sun went down and things started getting too private inside I got Old Man Turpentine to drive me to the Speedway, and that’s where I saw Boobie staring at that fire.

So maybe that wheat field stuff’s legit?

And now I’m going eighty in Boobie’s dad’s Skylark, looking for blackbirds and trying to name the baby. There were forty-seven of them this morning. Forty-seven blackbirds flying like a big smile in the sky.

I think Charles is a good name.

Charles is good, and so is Marcus.

Later I’ll change his diaper and feed him bananas and milk and hold him till he falls asleep. As long as he keeps those spider hands off of me I’ll be okay. As long as the sun doesn’t start burning in me too bad.

I don’t know if I could sell my little brother. But then again I’ve never had one so I couldn’t tell you for sure.

I guess Boobie has to do what he has to do.

Boobie busted me watching him in Aladdin’s Castle at the Joliet Mall. I’d just skated from Bob Motley’s cuz of that film they wanted to put me in and I knew him and his crew would be hunting me.

You can always hide good in the Aladdin’s Castle cuz of the Grand Prix game. If you’re small like me you can squeeze under the steering wheel.

I was begging tokens from this rich nigger kid called Cato, and Boobie comes walking in all long and dark and restless with the money jangling in his pockets and them black eyes and that flowing hair and his one fingernail that he colors. I ain’t never seen no colored fingernail on no man like that before. I couldn’t help but look. Once I watched this panther at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. This man called Jimmyjack took about ten of us there from the halfway house in Lockport. That panther was from a jungle in Africa and he was pacing in his cage, back and forth, back and forth. I almost had to stop looking cuz I started getting this feeling that he was gonna freeze me with the mirrors in his eyes. When the zoo lady fed it, it opened its mouth and you could see how pointy his teeth was. For some reason, Boobie’s black fingernail was like that, too.

I turned back to Cato, who was jacking up Glass Joe in Punchout II, and I was like, “C’mon, Cato, lemme get a token,” just to get my mind off of Boobie, and Cato was all, “Come on, yo, wait till my game’s up!” but something inside me made me look at Boobie again.

Then all them video game sounds just sort of went quiet and my brain got all cold and for a second I thought I was gonna get one of them migration headaches.

All I remember is that when Boobie turned and walked out of Aladdin’s Castle it felt like something inside me was gonna bust; like one of my lung bubbles was gonna pop or some shit.

I followed Boobie through the food court and out into the parking lot. It was so boiling outside you could feel the heat coming off the cars like they was breathing. Boobie passed all them cars and started walking down the street. I know he knowed I was following him, too, cuz he turned back and seen me.

He walked all the way past Five Corners and made that soft right onto Gaylord Drive and kept on going past the Crest Hill water tower. When he got to Rosalie’s Roller-skating Rink he turned right on the noname gravel road and went into Crazy Lou’s woods.

You ain’t even supposed to go near them woods cuz Crazy Lou has all these Doberman pincher dogs; like skeighty-eight of them suckers. Bob Motley said Crazy Lou’s a Marine who owns them woods all to himself and that he spends all his time shooting his rifle at birds and squirrels and all these cats that he farms.

That’s pretty messed up if you think about it: farming cats like that just so you can hunt them. I ain’t trying to say that I like cats, cuz them animals is greedy and nasty if you ask me; I’m just saying farming something just so you can hunt it don’t seem right.

When we got into Crazy Lou’s woods there was all these N
O
T
RESPASSING
signs nailed to the trees. Boobie was laying on the ground with his arms spread wide. It looked like he was sleeping. We was pretty deep in, so the sun wasn’t coming through too crisp and the little bit of sky you could see looked all dark and bruised.

I stood over Boobie for a minute and then I started poking him with a stick. When I told Curl about that, she said it was smart cuz it’s supposed to be bad luck to use your hand when you try to wake somebody. She says you’re supposed to use a stick or some water.

First I poked him in the side and then I poked him in the leg and then I poked him in the hair cuz it looked all shiny and I wanted to see it move. And when it moved it felt like something
inside
me was moving, too, I ain’t kidding.

I was like, “Hey . . . hey, kid. . . .”

Then out of nowhere, Boobie reached up and grabbed my hand and put it right on his hair. He kept his eyes closed when he did that, too, like he could see what I was doing with his
ears
. Then he guided my hand over his hair so I could
feel
how shiny it was, and that shit felt shinier than most things, I tell you that.

Boobie moved my hand up and down on his hair for like a minute. I don’t think I breathed once the whole time.

Then he got up off the ground and he waved at me to follow him some more and I was like, “Cool,” cuz I wasn’t staying noplace noways.

On the way out of Crazy Lou’s woods I started telling Boobie how I got busted the night before sleeping in the organ loft at St. Raymond’s Cathedral and how this evil priest with jackknife eyebrows splashed holy water on me and chased me out, going, “He will feast on the depraved!” and shit like that.