Ride Around Shining (14 page)

“Well, you probably made it with some of the other guys,” I said soothingly.

“Don't think I won't slap you now,” she said, half raising her hand in the dark.

“I've never been slapped.”

I caught the hint of a new smell and then the side of my face broke out tingling. The heel of her hand caught me on the jaw and I felt an ache shiver down my neck and one of my vertebrae crack. I wanted to shake loose the clouded, jarred feeling, but I held my face still, so she'd have to wait for my response.

I stared and she stared back, eyes alight with furious amusement.

“‘Woman! You crazy?!'” she mocked in a hard whisper.

I was looking at the balloons over her shoulder, feeling the pleasure of the slap, and the delight that would come from beating her with them in revenge, harmlessly, when I heard a dry
hunh
of a chuckle and sensed figures looming. I was put in shadow; the fire was blotted out.

“Hit him some mo',” somebody said.

She flinched and drew herself away.

“White boy, every time I see you, you gettin' hurt,” said the nearest loomer. I looked up at the thickset blotch of him and tried to remember who this was, who even in commiseration seemed angry.

“You know this chalk?” the first voice asked.

“I seen this chalk shot with a flare,” the near man said. “I seen this chalk get just about melted, man.”

It was the man from the crap game. Ordinarily I might've been pleased to be remembered by someone so antithetical to myself, even if it was just for being shot. But they'd come up and broken into a privacy I wanted to prolong.

“Is this guy bothering you?” Goat said idiotically, meaning me.

“He okay,” Shida said. “I was just showing him how to do that.”

“You wan show me, too?” said the first man, who had called me a chalk, a thin anonymous figure with an entitled drawl. In the dim he looked like the universal ballplayer, so without memorable characteristics he'd need to wear a special headband or elbow sleeve to distinguish himself.

They all went quiet, waiting for her answer. I watched her, feeling shouldered aside, wanting her to say she only slapped me, but she seemed to find the situation familiar, and I watched a look of resignation flit across her face.

“Okay,” she said, and suddenly stood, and I watched in disbelief as her arm bent back and her open hand flew out.

The thin man caught her by the wrist and held her, watching her carefully. He laughed his dry
hunh
of a laugh, once. Then he just took her away. I couldn't believe she would really go. Her arm remained fully extended, like a proud prisoner, but she walked along behind him. The rest of the group turned and trailed after the couple, Goat striding excitedly to keep up.

“I can't slap all you,” I heard her say.

Somebody told her she could try.

As they moved away, I saw Belmont was with them, and he turned to me a moment with what must have been sympathy.

“But I was talking to her,” I said.

“You could come, too. But it's best you don't.” And then he melted away and was gone.

I stood and looked around at the laughing, cordial faces of the drinkers who had stepped aside for this rough procession. I felt my face screw up in judgment and in condemnation of them, of their automatic politeness that did not know what it was condoning, yet I felt paralyzed but to condone it myself, by my own uncertainty about what would happen to her, and her resignation to it. The fire stung my face, the roaring pyre turning before my eyes from a festive backdrop into the killing, consuming element it had always been.

I needed to see Calyph. In his absence he seemed a slumming angel who would know this moral terrain surely and instantly, and I wandered the estate after any sign of him with a glass in my hand, and then another, feeling only sicker and more sober with each drink. I went out to the cliff and found no one and looked down at the obliterating waves. Coming back again, I ended up by the fire at the table with the masks. Feeling by that point that my knowledge of the secret going on up in the house, in some bed in some little room, had disconnected and banished me from the society of the party, I put on the mask of the Clinton family cat, hoping to be comforted.

The two women came past with their own masks pulled up flat on top of their heads.

“Socks!” they said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Have you seen Calyph?”

“Who?”

“The basketball player.”

“Ha-ha,” one said.

“Be more specific, cat.”

I opened my mouth against the flat of the mask with further impatience but felt a strange blankness in my mind. I could not describe him.

“He needs a haircut,” I said finally. “He's proud. When he laughs he looks crazy.”

They looked back at me blankly.

“The injured one,” I said.

“Oh,” they both said swiftly. But they shook their heads.

“Come back, Socks,” they called after me. Stumbling beyond the edge of the light, I almost bumped into Joseph Jones, who sat primly at a wrought-iron table in the gloom, a thick binder open in front of him as if he were auditing the party. He frowned at me, and as soon as I was by him I peeled off my mask and tossed it away.

When I could wander no longer, when there was nowhere left to go but after her, I squared myself and went slowly back toward the house. Lit from within with soft and ordinary light, it had a solid and almost monastic look after the pavilion. Walking toward it, I tried to instill in myself the hope that I was moving out of the backyard wilderness into a more ordered world.

The whole main floor was empty. In the dining room, the food lay covered in its dishes, present only in its smell. In the white living room, a pot of tea sat next to two clean glasses. I cupped the pot and it warmed my hand.

Then he came up the stairs, from where our rooms were, buttoning his cuffs, the universal player. I straightened and moved toward him, looking for signs, for scratches on his neck or who knew what, but he looked only bored and flawless and entirely composed.

“'Sup, chalk,” he said, and nodded as he went past, moving without slowing, acknowledging and dismissing me in one gesture, out toward the wilderness.

And then I heard voices from below. Even as they broke out in argument I was moving, and yet as soon as I saw Ras appear he was speeding toward me and past me already at an impossibly brisk walk.

“Do not come down heah,” he said in a loud, fussy voice. “Do not come down.”

Below in the low, narrow hall, Belmont leaned against the wall opposite a closed door, frowning. As I watched, Ras took him by the shoulder, then stood in front of the door, angrily composing himself. Inside it was quiet but for a heavy jerking sound, like a bed being moved by two people who disagreed about where to put it.

“We told him it won like that,” Belmont said. “She okayed the first brother, you know? We told him you can't just go in. You gotta wait for her to say. But he didn't wanna hear it.”

“Just go, please,” Ras said. “Just please go back to de party and enjoy yourself.”

He straggled away, troubled but reprieved, too willing, and I followed him out of the hall and then stopped around the corner.

I heard Ras take a last square breath, making himself ready, and then the knob of the door turned and I heard three voices rise up all at once, protesting one another, the men arguing indistinguishably beneath a woman's sudden, powerful, repetitive cry of no. It didn't go on long—what was there to argue, next to that cry—but the man inside the room demanded his say, and so a dispute sprang up, and continued even out into the hall, as Goat limped past me shirtless and smelling of fresh rubber, bleeding from the ear and pulling with all the dignity he could summon at his loose unbelted slacks. As Ras shoved him along, Goat was using, in the maintenance of his own defense, the same phrases he had so recently come to favor, between bottles of champagne, as organizing principles for his life as it culminated in parties, that this, just this, this was how you knew you had a sweet time, this was how you knew what to remember, and even after I lost sight of him, herded away in the passage toward the pool, he was still doggedly negotiating the prospect of being allowed to return.

I crept up to the dark, half-shut door, listening. I wanted to go in but the bitter smell in the air repelled me.

Inside, a lamp clicked on, and in the sudden light I pushed through. She was sitting in bed, clothed, opening a book. She looked at me firmly, as if willing me to accept the normalcy of this scene, and I could think of nothing to say or even to look back at her. I just stood. She wore a loose turtleneck sweater and an overlarge pair of square, plastic-framed glasses. There was only the bitter rubbery unmentionable smell of aftersex thickening the air.

“Fun's over,” she said finally.

I went and sat at the end of the bed.

“You think you gonna hold my hand through this?” she asked. “We got people for that.”

“Let me see that book,” I demanded.

She handed it over with a scornful look, but readily. It seemed to relieve her a little not to be pitied, to fulfill a simple and immature demand. The novel was some historical Mormon thing about somebody's twenty-seventh wife or so, and I flipped dismissively through its pages. I read it for a few minutes, making a show of it. I was deeply pained by its every imagined transgression. She wanted to read her way back to normalcy and I hoped to do my part.

“I wish we could have kept talking before,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I was going to whup you with those balloons.”

“I'd have slapped you again.”

“Do you want to?”

There didn't even seem to be time for her to parse the question before I felt her palm again and my face break out tingling. I looked up at her, amazed.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Was that like rhetorical?”

“No,” I said, and she slapped me again on the other side.

“Okay,” I said.

“Your glow's balanced now,” she told me. “Don't that feel better?”

“Take it out on me,” I said. “Whatever you got.”

She looked at me flatly. I was not even in the same world as her trouble. “I took it out on him. I about ripped his nutsack open. He didn't even get it in, weak little crooked-dicked bitch. Now gimme my book.”

I heaved it at her carelessly and it splashed against her knees. Again I saw her palm flash out, but this time I was just ready enough to deflect her enough to get hurt, and her nail raked the corner of my mouth. I felt my head jerk in surprise, and my hand shot up, all out of proportion, as though to ward off permanent disfigurement.

“Poor baby. Did I hurt you?”

I tongued the spot and tasted blood.

I felt her hand again on my face, tenderly now, brushing my lip. Her face was poised beyond the blockade of her wack glasses. I heard the air going in through my nose loudly.

“The white man's skin . . .” she began, like she was narrating a nature documentary. “Feel like a newspaper nobody wanna look at.”

Her fingers traveled on, pressing lightly on my cheek. Her eyes were curious and unafraid, as though she were making a purely scientific inquiry. I felt myself holding my breath, in order to still myself, that I too might be controlled to this point of delicate sensitivity. I felt myself submitting to the scrutiny of her sad, almost pitying eyes and the touch of her impersonal fingers. I felt understood.

And then a strange, ripe smell caught in my nose. Her fingers brushed across the pores on my inner cheek, and I smelled faint spices from her cooking, but beneath, at the heart of the smell, there was something rank, something rotten or raw, as though the odor of bad meat had been pushed into the pores of her fingers, or that caught within her nails was some bit of pork fat. The bitter stink of aftersex from the first man again flooded my nose, smelling like rubber and the absence of love.

The smells seemed to join together in her then. They seemed to be coming from her very skin. I gave a hard involuntary cough. I'd never been that near to a black woman before—perhaps that was just how they smelled. I coughed again, and I saw her sadly curious eyes widen and then focus, and she leaned back swiftly, her face questioning and flattening already into defensive derision.

“Boy, you think this is that? After him?”

I sat there a moment, smelling her. I could feel it acrid in my nose. I exhaled, trying to suppress my revulsion, thinking of my own stink, of Calyph's sweat, of all the smells that had been pressed into her that night but her own. But I couldn't get any hold on myself. That's how they smell, some part of me whispered. I stood and turned away.

“I'll be right back,” I said, but I just left her there.

I felt a desperate need to wash my face, but the bathroom on the servants' floor was occupied—as a detainment center, I guessed, for I could hear Ras's low voice from within. Dazed, I wandered on, toward the pool, picking up a towel from the stack with the vague notion that in submerging myself altogether I could become so cleansed as to have my instinctive responses altered, so I was no longer revolted by the very blackness in her that was what drew me to their men. It had always been there, I knew, that fear, that a black woman should want me, or even just let me close to her, unrealized only because of the utter whiteness of my world. I thought of Shida's nose and the texture of her hair, and how when she bent over I saw her as a fieldworker, and felt all the narrow, frowning men of my lineage, their faces behind my face, angry and impotent and wasted, men gone from the earth and the earth better for it, myself the last of this dying fallacy.

The poolroom was darker the higher you looked, the walls wavering in the upcast of its submerged lights. The rock wall where earlier in the week the Pharaoh had led an afternoon of cliff diving was pocked with black that glistened like volcanic glass, and beyond the pool a curtain of steam hung still above a raised stone tub. I was about to strip off my shirt when I heard a sneeze.