Verge: Stories

SHOOTING

She pulls up to a stop sign like blood throb. Motherfucker. She has a flat; she can feel it like a bruised shoulder. Front left. She wheels it over to the curb. Her jaw aches. Her left eye twitches.

Jack. Spare. Tire iron. Truncated lines stack themselves in her skull as she moves. The line Ten years. The line Suffering makes us stronger. She sets up the metal that will fix her, there on the road’s shoulder. It makes a cross. She can’t not see it as a cross. The line Recovering Catholic. This makes her laugh. She thinks, Jesus Christ, then, Goddamn it.

First crank. The muscle in her right arm pops up, ready. The cords in her neck tighten. Her left arm dulls over; memory.

YEAR ONE. Her face down near the pavement. Skin, she thinks. Up close the road looks like bumpy, black, magnified skin. She remembers sitting on the pavement, laughing hysterically until the light changed and he grabbed her by the scruff and yanked her back into the car. She still had vomit smear around her mouth, but she was laughing her ass off. Seven hundred dollars, he said. You can’t just carry your money around in your pockets like that. Look at it, he said, it nearly fell out into the street there, it’s got barf on it, for crissake. She was still laughing. She couldn’t help it.

YEAR TWO. I’ll pay you two hundred fucking dollars to kiss that guy on the mouth. She waved the cash in one hand like a gray-green fan, steering with the other. Her lover and some guy they picked up on the side of the road. They’d been driving for two hours in some shit-sack place in Texas, and she was bored. Flat flat flat fuck this state, was what she always thought of Texas. Pancake flat. Hand splat on pavement flat. Where do you come up with this shit? he asked, to which she replied, Kiss that guy on the mouth with tongue. The two men looked at each other innocently. They were high, childlike. They were more beautiful than was humanly possible. She wanted it. She wanted his mouth on his mouth in her rearview. She wanted man-on-man wet like that. She pulled the car over into dirt and scrub and the lost dry heat of endless sky. She got out of the car. Her boots crunch-printed tracks on that land. She leaned against the red metal, smooth as a drive-in movie. She smoked. She waited for them. She waited for them to meet a woman with a want bigger than Texas.

And they did it. They split her money. Then they all fixed there in the shade of the open trunk, wide open as a mouth. Her eyes went wild like fire. Then closed. Her arm lax. Her mouth open. Her desire a flooded desert. Smile float teeth vertebrae melt.

YEAR THREE. They never spoke of it except to call it “the incident.” It started out around nine p.m. They had an epic fight. She slammed the door and left. She went to a bar he knew about but did not frequent much with her. The bar she haunted before she found him: club dancing and sleeping with women. She wanted something back. Or she wanted to be free to shoot around like a marble again. Or she wanted something else.

Inside the bar the smell and the dark and the red vinyl and the sticky black linoleum floor and the regulars and the deejay and her hair, hanging behind her, she could feel it on her back, it comforted her. In a flash she’s dancing hard as a boxer with a woman who is thin and muscular and jagged-haired.

Every time they fight, she wants to run or fix.

She remembers the incident. She understands the unsuturable scar it left over his heart. She can see hear smell feel the flash of memory, one scene at a time: His footsteps walking up his own driveway. The windows of the car fogged up. The car seeming to move there in the driveway. What he saw next. He opened the car door. A man was fixing her, but he was also fucking her, his dick was already sliding into her smooth as a needle into its waiting. He grabbed the guy by the hair and yanked him out of the car.

She imagines him showing up at this bar and walking across the floor exactly the same as walking across their front lawn during the incident. She can see him stepping closer to her hair, whipping around as she dances too hard with a woman.

She remembers during the incident how he grabbed her left arm. The needle ripping across her upturned flesh, ripping a second mouth open in the pale and infant-thin skin. She remembers laughing, but there was blood coming from her arm. Her left arm the bruise her left arm the poem her left arm their fucked-up love her arm her past story of herself. Emergency. Emergency room. Her blood cleaned up and put back into her, their love put back into her, her arm sutured and bandaged.

In the club she’s dance-humping a woman who’d been her lover once upon a time. She is in full motion, sweat, the pounding of sound, bodies beating each other for all they’re worth. She’s deaf with desire and wet movement. She’s a blur. She’s smudging herself into moving particles, a streak of atoms.

And then he is there. His hand there in the club. On her shoulder. Her hair. She spins a bit, then stops, seeing his face in the club mirror. She looks at him, and he looks back for a long minute.

He grabs her arm in sharp interruption. She knows that hand like the back of her hand. She spins round to face him, and his face, and his pulling her outside, and their yelling in a parking lot, and her pounding the metal of the car, and his throwing her against it, and his getting in to drive away from her, and her opening the passenger-side door, and his yanking it closed against her, and her arm breaking there, blue, red, bone, her arm in the door, her arm their life, her bandaged arm shattering like sticks.

YEAR FOUR. Road tripping. Somewhere near the coast. A roadside park. Redwoods and tree needles, and California has a smell. Cooking up mushrooms in a Cup-a-Soup at a picnic table. Cross-country. Crossing country. Landmasses. Flight. Then their bodies began to numb, they yawned, they laughed, colors changed shape, and little vague star shapes clattered at the edges of their vision.

Sitting together, they watched a drunken man climb up the side of the embankment there at the roadside park. He was a Rasta, with a long black ponytail and pockmarked skin; with his rainbow-crocheted hat and sleeveless white T-shirt and khaki shorts, he seemed like a cartoon. He looked a hundred years older than he was. They watched mesmerized as he climbed, pulling on shrubs and branches and shit, getting smaller and smaller as he scrambled up the hill. She laughed, almost under her breath. He put his hand beneath her shirt. Cupped her breast, then felt her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. It felt to him like a ball bearing. Then the man lost his grip and tumbled slow-motion Technicolor back down the hill, head over heels, all the way to the road, where he landed with a splat. Or a bone crash. Everyone, which was just the three of them, kept still for about a minute. Then he stood up and walked away like it was the most normal thing in the universe.

They got their mountain bikes out and decided to ride them onto the freeway. An excellent plan. On the freeway they saw colors shooting by like molecules or corpuscles or DNA strands.

After several hours and some food and some whiskey and an attempt at fucking that turned into a nap, they came back to themselves. They got into the car again and drove off, blasting the Doors on the car CD player. She was laughing. She had whiskey all over her body. She always was clumsy, like a kid. They came around a California-coast turn in the road, and everything stopped. Cars ahead of them with their brake lights on like beady animal eyes all in a row. There was an accident. They saw the ambulance. They saw guys with uniforms carrying a stretcher, broken glass scattered, smashed metal like a disgruntled face. They saw a guy on the stretcher with a big beige neck brace, his skin paler than two-percent milk. He was covered with blood and something the color of iodine, and his mouth, his eyes, had gone slack, as if everything had been driven out of him. His arm dangled off the side of the stretcher; it looked bigger than it should, like a crab claw. She was laughing. Always laughing during the most horrible moments. He wanted to clock her one, but he didn’t. Instead he drove them slow as blood beyond this scene.

When they could see the ocean again, he said, What the fuck are you laughing at? How was that funny? She said, Did you see his ribs? I swear to god, they looked like they’d exploded out of his chest and broken into wings. Did you fucking see that? And he watched her head rock back. And her eyes close. And her needing to say that. And her terrible out-of-whack beauty.

YEAR FIVE.

As you know incarcerations.

As you know the roof of your own mouth.

As you know the fingers you use to touch yourself.

As you know what hurts and what you want to hurt toward pleasure.

As you know the stupid line that does not exist there.

As you know the spit in your mouth.

As you know going down on a woman. Age fifteen. Age twenty. Age thirty.

As you know his mouth will never be her mouth.

As you know his taste will never be hers.

As you know your teeth clenching, wishing, wanting, biting.

As you know the scars you carry.

As you read the Braille of your own body, self-inscription.

As you know the scripts we are given fold in on themselves: This is a woman.

As you know vodka pooling in your mouth better than saliva.

As you know the word “want” as an entire lexicon.

As you know the weight of your left arm, the pull, the mastery of your right hand, the tubing in your teeth, the skill of your fingers at work, the flesh taking the stab, the vein pulsing toward rupture, the breathing slowing in your lungs, the nod, the warm air rushing up your throat, your skull, the sockets of your eyes, you nearly swallowing your own teeth, my god, the knowing, the rain let loose to pure body, her knowing, the first shot received as a child, the not crying, the fascination, the looking up with the eyes of a child at a beautiful man in white, his giving.

This is what a woman wants. This is wanting. Be good.

As you know sentences will fail.

As you know to take a needle and cum.

From that.

Need driving you.

Shooting.

YEAR SIX. Motherfucker. Mother. Fucker. The phrase “detox for Recovering Catholics.” They gave her a roommate with red hair. She wanted her. She watched her in her sleep and masturbated under white sheets. Her hands alive and unflinching. The redheaded woman became her need. Her drive. She lunged, propelled herself across their room, over linoleum and white, over sterile and clean—too clean—shock-backed floors and walls.

Turned out the redhead was awake too. Sweating. Corpselike in a pool of herself. Breathing in rapid bursts. Her hands on fire.

They devoured each other, nearly, like animals locked up.

Next day they would sit in a semicircle with other women, black circles under every eye. Most were smoking. Legs thrown out in front of them at odd angles. Mouths, eyes, all saying resist resist resist. Hearts saying fuck you fuck you fuck you fast or slow.

She would think goddamn it, then lines that mimic that phrase: Dogs have it, Go bang it, Fuck bag it, Gun big it. She’d laugh. Is something funny, L? Did you have something to say? Do you think maybe laughter is your cover story? Huh? Let’s hear about it. C’mon. Show us some guts. Take a risk for once in your life. Tell us something we don’t know. You mad? You got some rage in you that you think is special?

Cunt throb it.

Hand ram it.

Lead blood it.

Goddamn it.

She was forced to stay an extra four months for carving GODDAMN IT into her arm with a sharpened and resharpened pencil.

THE LOST YEAR. She was in the parking lot of Our Lady of Little Flowers Church. She was there for a commitment ceremony. He asked, What’s a commitment ceremony? She called him a dumb fuck. It’s when two queer people want to love each other in public. He didn’t say anything, then did. She’d been clean nine months. Does it mess with you? What? That she’s marrying someone else? Someone not you? Or that you married me? Is that it? Was that it? Does that make you feel incarcerated or something?

All she heard in her head was blood pounding goddamn it goddamn it goddamn it, driving her crazy, making her brain propel itself down the rivers of her body into the veins in her arm into lines like what is a woman what is a woman what am I?

YEAR EIGHT. Driving in the desert. For all she was worth. With her whole body. Her mind gone wild. Her hair like fire. Her cells dividing, in rage or love or just plain need. She drove most of the year. Or at least it seemed that way.

YEAR NINE. What was shooting? To cause to be projected, to cause to fire, to kill by doing this, to wound by doing this, to put to death with a bullet as punishment, to hunt, to destroy or move with a projectile. To project something forward, out, toward. To direct with the rapidity of a moving bullet. To put into action. To detonate. To photograph. To increase in speed. To flash across the sky. To dart painfully in or through a part or parts of the body.

YEAR TEN. Pulled over on the shoulder. Flat tire. Her ordinary arms change a tire on an ordinary car. Then into her vision comes somebody pulling over. Was it her hair that drew them, driving out in blond tracks against the sky? It is a man, she thinks, a beautiful man, his hair long and windblown. He gets out of his car and from the knee down his legs get bigger and bigger. When he is a foot away from her, he stops. Then and only then she looks up. Up from the black leather boot to the bottom cuff of his jeans up his shin to his knee to his thigh up his denim to his cock. Then up his belly his torso his collarbone she pictures under his T-shirt and then up to his jaw his mouth his eyes. His whole face. Then his lips. They could be anyone’s lips. They could be hers.

“It looks like you could use,” is all she hears.

She lets this random man help her even though she doesn’t need. His arms working are beautiful. His hands. The insides of his arms. His veins cording across his arms more familiar than his face.

When he is finished, he says, “Do you want to score?”

And it hits her. Shoots through her. The past wants. Like a mouth salivating. Like a cunt begging. Like the weight of an arm. Like the next sentence. Like a faith that won’t be arrested. The past can break her body no matter what, can move her, propel her, speed her, drive her open, the past’s needing, no stopping it.

She bends down to tend to the tire. She screws the new tire in tight, pockets the wrench, slips back into her car, and drives.