Sometimes Rachel
chapter 1 - nude, descending
White haze. I walk as if blind, following the dog. The streets are empty, hushed. Through an open window I see a family sitting down to supper. Behind them a television flickers silent, bleeding colors. The dog stops to piss. Not my dog. I'm keeping him for a friend. Traffic lights change red to green with no cars to stop or go. My boots scrape. The dog's collar jingles. If I concentrate just so, there is the subconscious hum of something about to happen.
I scan the street and a rambling figure approaches, shape shifting through morphine white. Something familiar in the short warped stride. Coming closer and I see it's a white male in middle twenties. Squat and muscular, wearing loose torn shorts. One leg hanging longer than the other. Disintegrating gray T-shirt with ripped pocket and shapeless brown hat. It looks like Owen, and now I remember. Someone said he was living around here.
It's been four years and I sift what news I've had. Owen's girlfriend supposedly had a kid. I can't remember the girlfriend's name, though I fondled her once, drunkenly in a parking lot. Her phone number was written on my hand but disappeared with dead skin and I never called her. I should have, because a few months later she was living with Owen. She stopped bleeding and they were married by a judge. Last thing I heard they had an accident. Owen supposedly freaked out driving high in the rain and went over a guard rail. The car rolled five times. He was barely hurt but she went through the window face first, and the kid was born retarded or something. And since then I don't know. Owen was never exactly a friend, just someone I knew in the fifth grade.
I think Owen will just fade past. Eyes flick over me and away. I hesitate. Owen stops and now the dog goes tense.
Thought it was you, Travis.
Owen. Heard you were around.
My place is down the street. Come up and say hello to Sally.
Owen's left eyelid is nervous, twitching under the brim of his hat, a fishing hat that was once white now brown with dirt. I can't say no. His voice has changed, mutated somehow, but I would know him anywhere. Dog sniffs his ankles furiously and I yank the leash.
What's your dog's name?
Not my dog. His name is Grinch.
Two claustrophobic minutes to the apartment building without speaking. Owen stares ahead and rattles keys around in his pocket. The building is old brick. Small balconies with dark rusted screens. Heavy iron fire escape. The kind of radiators that hammer all night. I follow Owen up creaking stairs. Dust rising. Owen wears rotting tennis shoes secured with duct tape. Orange socks. Grinch whining from the throat. Finally the door and I have to say something.
How long you guys lived here?
Two. Maybe three years.
Owen fumbles with the lock while I calculate. The baby would be about three. It was surely not mine.
Where you working? I say.
Don't need to work. Owen approximates a grin. Insurance, he says.
The air is trapped inside. The mingling, intimate stench of wet carpet and cigarettes. Tomato sauce and fried egg. Puppy shit and baby puke and semen and mold. Grinch is pulling and I unclip the leash. Owen takes off his hat, then his shirt. His head is balding and soon he puts the hat back on. The heat is fierce and the windows are shut.
Painted shut, says Owen. Take off your shirt, if you want.
I hesitate, then drag off my shirt. Drop it in a chair and follow Owen, who walks sideways crablike circling and his eyes steady on me.
This is the living room, he says. Decent light in the morning but the carpet's all the time damp. Can't figure it out. This here is the kitchen. Too small for doing much and the garbage needs going out. Hey. Let's get a drink.
No, I say. I stopped. Recently.
There's a beer I think, and some wine. Owen lifts a green jug. An inch of murky red.
I stopped.
Why?
Things happen, when I drink. I can't remember.
Owen's mouth hangs open. Good to forget, he says.
Sometimes.
What do you drink, then?
Coffee, most of the time.
Never touch it. Bad for my stomach.
That's fine. Really.
Well, says Owen. In here's the sunroom. Always little dust particles floating around in the light. If it was sunny you could see. Bedroom is back there.
There is almost no furniture in the apartment. Boxes and dust and scattered trash. Listen but I don't hear baby sounds. The bedroom door is closed. My stomach growls. I smell oranges, bright and sweet. Left hand feels strangely numb and I make a fist.
That is some killer ink, says Owen.
He's looking at my chest. The tattoo is a boa constrictor, slightly coiled. The head is poised to bite the nipple. The work is crude, with scars. It was done when I was nineteen, at Fort Pillow, residential correctional facility for boys.
It goes all the way down, I say.
Down what?
Past my waist.
Oh, yeah. Let's see.
I hesitate, then sit on a coffee table to take off my boots.
Better take your socks off. Else get them wet.
Uh huh.
I take my jeans off. The boa's tail pokes out of my shorts and stops at mid thigh. I drop the shorts and stand very still. Owen sighs, pleased. And then Sally walks in from the next room. She wears a dirty white T-shirt and panties. Her hands are white, covered with fine powder. Her face is ruined. Her mouth is twisted slightly, the lips don't meet. Her jaw and left cheek are shiny with scar tissue and the left eye has been rebuilt. That she was once beautiful is easy to see, a kid could see it, and I reckon that only makes it harder to bear. I crouch and jerk up my shorts.
Look who's here, Owen says. It's Travis.
Travis. Her mouth jerks.
Hello, Sally.
I kissed her mouth in a parking lot, five years ago. Her lips were heavy and red, her tongue fierce. Now she sticks a finger in her mouth and licks away powder.
How are you? I hear you had a baby.
Oh, yes. A beautiful baby boy.
Her eyes are wild and bright.
I'd like to see him.
He's sleeping now. But maybe another time.
She smiles and sucks at her finger, staring coldly at Grinch. The dog has been sitting at my feet. Now he stands, slinks out of the room. His nails are loud going down the stairs.
That's not my dog, I say. I should go get him.
Don't go, Owen says.
Sally is making noises like a bird chirping. She presses herself up against Owen, her hands moving over his chest and arms, leaving pale streaks of the powder. Her mouth goes to his throat. Owen just stares hard at me. Sally grunts softly, pushing with her hips. She steps back and shrugs out of the shirt. Her breasts are large. Stretch marks on her dark flat belly. Now the underpants drop and she is naked against Owen.
Her body is lovely.
I really have to go, I say.
No response from Owen. Sally makes animal sounds.
I pull on my jeans and look around. Where the hell is my shirt?
Sally's body wriggles against Owen, who responds only with his mouth. His hands never touch her. I find my shirt, tuck it into my belt. I scoop up the dog's leash. My feet are wet from the mildewed carpet. The blood crashes in my head. Feels like my eyes are expanding in their sockets. Mouth is hot and I try to swallow. Pull on my socks, torn cotton sticking against skin. I get them on at last and focus on the laces of my boots. My fingers don't work. I hear what sounds like a groan of protest from Sally.
I look up.
She's sitting on the floor with her back to me, a posing nude. The ridged shadows of her spine like an exhibit at the zoo. Owen is gone. Now the left boot feels too tight, like I have two socks on that foot. The laces are in sweaty knots and I'm fucked if I'll try to work them loose. The leash is looped around my fist, a short heavy piece of leather with chrome clip dangling. I have got to get the fuck out. I want to say something to Sally but I barely know her. Her back is still to me.
There's a nudge at my left shoulder and I turn and Owen is kneeling beside me with a dead puppy cradled in his arms. Holding it up to my face as if to let it kiss me and the expression on his face is that of a father offering me his newborn for inspection. I go blank. This is not the baby. Owen thrusts the dead puppy at me and I jerk my head back. I try to stand but Owen has the collar of my shirt in a fist, pulling hard and now I feel the puppy's cold nose touch my lips. I swing the leash and hit Owen in the face with the chrome clip and he falls over crying. The puppy drops like a piece of firewood.
Grinch is waiting when I make the street.
Two days later, I go back. Tell myself I'm just in the neighborhood. I knock and there is a long silence before Sally opens the door. She is dressed as before. Dirty white T-shirt and panties. I can smell her. She looks at me then turns away. I follow her to the bedroom. She lifts a large sleeping child from its crib.
This is Henry, she says.
She holds the child by the armpits. His feet twitch and he makes a sucking noise.
Take him, she says
I hold the child to my chest. He's heavy.
Where is Owen?
He's gone. He took his things.
Do you have any money?
No. Some food stamps.
The baby wakes, screams in my face. Sally closes her eyes.
Give him to me.
What are you going to do?
She looks at me. The rebuilt eye blinks irregularly.
If you want, I say. You can stay at my place.
I help her pack some things in plastic grocery bags. She doesn't have a suitcase. The baby cries steadily. Rise and fall like traffic. After a few minutes it makes me sick, nervous. Sally has pitifully few clothes.
Sally.
What?
The baby is crying.
That's normal.
It doesn't sound normal.
Sally picks up a crumpled black dress. She pulls it on over the T-shirt.
I'm not Sally anymore, she says.
What do you mean?
I'm Rachel. From now on, you have to call me Rachel.
She leaves the front of her dress unbuttoned.
Rachel, I say.
That's right.
I look around. The apartment is nothing but a box of dust. The sun doesn't live here.
Okay. Are you ready to go?
She wraps Henry in a towel. Her feet are bare.
What about some shoes? I say.
I don't have any.
Five years before. A Wednesday night at the Hole. A grinding punk band with junkie vocalist hunched on the drum riser. The lyrics mangled like a person being sick. Plastic cups of warm dollar beer and mounted televisions white with snow. A girl thin and catlike in leather jacket, wearing cowboy boots with bare legs. Slash of nose and fierce red mouth. I followed her drunk outside. Piggly Wiggly parking lot. Skin pale green and lips black under buzzing lights. The smell of her lipstick, chemical cherry. My back against a car. Long cool tongue darting into my mouth and beer spilling across the hood. I reached under her jacket and tore it open. She was naked under a thin T-shirt. She jerked my jeans loose and held me in her fist. I pulled her into the car. Dark humps of clothing and garbage on backseat. She was patient, sucking me a long time. A wasp crawled along the armrest, waiting to die. I was drunk and trying not to be sick. She stopped, eventually. I may have passed out. She scratched her number on my hand. Blue ink wrinkled in sunburned skin and I promised to call her. I promised.