Cornered

by Rhoda Belleza

  She shakes her head. “Only the Prophet.”

  “So you never been on the Internet?” She shakes her head, not so high and mighty now. “How ’bout TV? You got cable?”

  She shakes her head again. “We watch DVDs sometimes—but only those which the Prophet has approved.”

  “That prophet’s got you locked down, girl. ‘Upstate’ sounds like prison to me.”

  “Our simple life frees us from temptation. In our tribe, we devote ourselves to serving God and loving one another.”

  “Uh huh. I bet there’s a whole lotta lovin’ goin’ on up there. Folks must be bored outta their minds!”

  “There’s no time to get bored. Caring for children is a full-time job.”

  “Yeah, but you only got one kid to take care of.” She frowns and puts her hand over her belly but says nothin’. “Know what I think? I think you need to break outta that ‘tribe.’”

  Whitegirl bites her lip and turns back to the two-way mirror. She pulls her long braid over her shoulder and starts to set her hair free. I watch her for a second, then stand up and go over to stand beside her. I don’t know why, but I help her spread out her long hair, and then I show her how to arrange it so she looks sixteen and not sixty. “See? It looks good, right?”

  She nods and smiles at her image in the mirror. Then she turns and smiles at me. I can’t remember the last time someone smiled at me like that—someone my own age, someone who hasn’t just paid me to do something nasty for them. I want to smile back, but instead I take up my purse and fish out some lip gloss. “Hold still,” I say. The whitegirl stands beside me like a statue while I apply the gloss. “Now pout. Good. Now do this.” I roll my lips together and make a smacking sound. She tries to mimic me, then giggles and touches her lips. We look at each other in the two-way glass. “You’re a hottie, girl! All you need now is a divorce.”

  She stares at her reflection, but after a few seconds her smile starts to fade. “Is Tarell coming to get you?”

  I flop back onto the sofa. “Naw. I gotta wait till my aunt shows up.”

  “Are you going to live with her now?”

  “Hell, no! But CPS will only release you to a family member. Tarell slips my aunt a few bills, and she bails me out. Then I go back to work.” I shrug. “Least that’s what happened last time. Who’s comin’ for you?”

  This gets her going again. She starts wringin’ her hands and pacin’ ’round the room, whimperin’ like a lost puppy. “Aw, hell . . . here we go again. Homespun—RELAX! I bet your mama’s saddlin’ up her horse to head down here right now.”

  She freezes and bites her lip. Then she turns to face me and says, “My mama’s not coming for me.”

  “How come?”

  With shaking hands she starts rebraiding her loose hair. “No one’s coming for me.”

  So much for tryin’ to help a sister out. Soon as she wipes the lip gloss off with the back of her hand, she’s back to lookin’ homely again. “You mean nobody in your whole entire ‘tribe’ is goin’ to bail you outta here?”

  She shakes her head and pulls at her fingers. “They can’t.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because . . . they’re in custody, too.” She turns away, ashamed.

  I stare at her, not sure I understand what she means. “ALL of ’em?”

  “There was a raid . . . someone called the police . . . they said the children were being abused. . . .”

  “Oh, I know all about that. Nosy fuckin’ neighbors—they need to mind their own damn business! Half the time it’s some trick’s dumb wife, callin’ the police when she oughta be takin’ notes. He wouldn’t be comin’ to us if she knew how to keep him happy. . . .”

  I stop when I realize that the whitegirl is quietly sobbing. Her arms are wrapped around her belly, and she’s doubled over as if she’s in pain. “Hey—you all right?” I glance at the two-way mirror, and shift to the edge of the sofa. Suddenly she starts to wail.

  “You better quit wailin’ like that or they gonna come in here and give you somethin’ to make you quiet. And trust me—you don’t want that.” She tones it down a bit but keeps on rockin’ and moanin’. I glance at the mirror again, then get up and go over to her. I put a hand on her shoulder and shake her a bit. “Come on, now. Pull yourself together. You can’t be cryin’ and fussin’ like this—think about your little girl!”

  That gets her attention. “You gotta be strong—for her. Right?” The whitegirl wipes her nose with her sleeve and nods at me. She quiets down, and I lead her back over to the sofa. She clutches the doll to her chest and rocks it back and forth.

  “Don’t worry—they gonna give your little girl back. They got to. It’s not like you was abusin’ her or nothin.’” I cut my eyes at her. “Right?”

  “No, no—I’d never hurt my baby! I wanted to save her—I had to save her from . . .”

  “From what?”

  She hangs her head and I have to lean in close to hear what she’s sayin’. “I had to save Abigail from all the things that happened to me. The Prophet, he . . . he . . .” She stops and looks straight into my eyes.

  “I hear you,” I say, even though she hasn’t actually said the words. “It’s always the high and mighty who turn out to be the biggest freaks. Huh. You should see my customers—politicians, preachers, even cops sometimes.” She’s sobbin’ again, so I wait a minute for her to calm down. “It was you who called the police, wasn’t it?”

  She’s shakin’ all over now but still manages to nod. “Polly said . . . Polly said it was the only way. . . .”

  So maybe this Polly really is a good friend. “Well, hell. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.” I push up close so that our shoulders are touching. “So. You can’t go back upstate. What you gonna do?”

  She sniffles, shrugs, then grows still. “You said Tarell has a big house?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “And some of the—girls—who work for Tarell. They’re just . . . temporary?”

  I frown and wonder where she’s goin’ with this. “Yeah . . .”

  “You think Tarell would let me work for him?”

  I look at this mousy whitegirl and think she must be play-in’ around. But she looks at me with those puppy dog eyes and I realize she’s for real. “You?” I crack up laughin’ and she turns pink again, so I try to explain myself. “It’s just that—well—you don’t got a lotta experience with men, bein’ married ’n all. . . . plus, Tarell don’t want no babies at his place. Bad for business, he says.” Ask Chynna.

  She grabs my arm and pleads with me. “Abigail’s a good baby—she’s real quiet and almost never cries! Plus, I—I know how to please a man. . . .”

  I seriously doubt that, but she swears it’s true.

  “My husband always said I was his favorite wife! He spent more nights with me than any of my cowives.”

  “Well . . . I didn’t know much when I was startin’ out. . . . Tarell had the other girls show me what to do, and I had to watch hours and hours of porn. I guess you never seen no porn, huh?”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, right—no cable or Internet upstate. Porn’s like dirty pictures or movies where folks have kinky sex. Most of it ain’t real. It’s just actors moanin’ and groanin’ and fakin’ it, but porn helps some folks get off.”

  She slowly starts to nod. “I think I did see porn—once.”

  “Really?”

  “The Prophet . . . sometimes he had us watch movies before . . . before we were initiated.”

  “Damn. Sounds like your ‘prophet’ was more like a pervert.”

  She blushes but don’t try to correct me. Instead she tries to make a case for workin’ for Tarell. “I’m a quick learner and a hard worker, plus I already know how to run a big household. I can cook, and clean . . . and I can sew!”

  I had to laugh at that. “Tarell ain’t gonna want none o’ us wearin’ your kinda clothes!”

  She looks over at my spandex dress and trie
s again. “I don’t need a pattern—you just draw what you want, or show me a picture, and I can make it! Honest, I can!”

  “Even lingerie? Skimpy, see-through stuff with lace?” She nods eagerly and for the first time I start to take this idea seriously. “Tarell could make a lotta dough off a snow bunny like you.” And there might be somethin’ in it for me if I bring her on board and make it work. Not even Chynna could top that! And I wouldn’t be the newbie no more.

  “Snow bunny?”

  “Tricks’ll pay more for a white girl like you.” She ain’t blond, but we can take care of that. Whitegirl nods like she understands, but I know this girl is clueless. It’d be up to me to train her and keep her from runnin’ away. “You still got a kid, Homespun. Unless . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Unless you decide to . . . give the baby up.” She jumps up so fast that the doll she’s been holdin’ falls to the ground. She wraps her arms around her belly and makes a sad, desperate sound. I stand up and try to make her see sense. “She’s probably already in foster care. You’re young—you’re in trouble. You don’t wanna raise your kid in a whorehouse.”

  The whitegirl seems to disintegrate. “What am I going to do?”

  We’re both surprised when the door opens and a social worker enters holding a clipboard. This one’s a lot older than the others and looks like she’s about ready to retire. She gives us a fake smile and reads a name off her clipboard.

  “Hester? We’re ready for you now.”

  I look at the whitegirl, surprised by her name. “I guess that’s you, huh?” She nods, takes a deep breath, and gets ready to leave. I glance at the social worker and then suddenly pull Hester back and whisper, “Don’t tell ’em nothin.’”

  “What?”

  “You in the system?”

  “System?”

  I shake her to make her listen. “You been arrested before?”

  “No!”

  “Then they don’t got your fingerprints on file. No fingerprints, no identity—no identity, no past. Get it? You’re brand new! You can be anyone you wanna be. . . .”

  I look straight at her and Hester nods but I can tell she don’t really understand. She drifts toward the social worker who’s sighin’ and tappin’ the clipboard with her pen.

  “Come along, dear.”

  Hester tries to leave, but I pull her close again and try to give her somethin’ that’ll help her survive out there. “They probably gonna put you in a group home. No big deal—you be outta there in no time! When you get out, if you still lookin’ for a job, come to 589 Walnut Lane—got that? 589 Walnut Lane.”

  “Hester—”

  “She’s comin’, bitch, relax!”

  The social worker presses her lips together and inches a bit closer to the door. I can tell by the look on her face that she’s afraid of me. I look at Hester and see that she’s kinda scared, too. And here I am tryin’ to help her! “589 Walnut Lane,” I whisper one last time. Hester nods and this time I let her go when she tries to pull away from me. The social worker opens the door and waits for Hester to join her. Just as she’s about to be escorted out of the waiting room, I call her back.

  “Homespun—hold up!” I hastily remove one pair of gold hoops from my ears and press them into Hester’s hand. “You can do what you want now, right? You’re free.”

  She smiles faintly but gives just a weak nod. Her lips say “thank you” but no sound comes outta her mouth. Then the social worker guides her outta the room and closes the door. I just stand there for a minute. I look around this crappy room, full of toys and pee smell and me. I head back over to the sofa, stooping to pick up the old ratty doll Hester had been clutching. I sink onto the sofa and look at the doll. Its one glassy blue eye winks at me. I ain’t got time for dolls no more. I toss it on the floor with all the other broken toys and reach for my purse. I reapply my lip gloss and examine my face in the compact mirror. But right now it’s showing me something I don’t wanna see, so I shut the compact with a soft click. Then I reach down for the doll, wrap my arms around it, and try hard not to cry.

  Like Kicking a Fence

  BY KATE ELLISON

  THE BLOOD SPRAYING out of Norman’s nose is thick and deep red, clotting like grape jelly beneath his septum. It sprays as Jean-Carlos kicks and kicks, kicks harder because it’s spraying now like an open hydrant along his new jeans—the nicest pair he owns—which fall halfway down his boxer shorts and cost him zilch because he stole them from Gadzooks. It was all on a dare, and not even a Double-Dare, but Jean-Carlos is valorous and does not shirk from dares, no matter what kind.

  The blood sprays onto Norman’s jeans, too. Norman’s nice, clean, pressed jeans with mustard-colored stitching along the seams and cuffs. The sight of them—dirtied-up now, untidily blood-smattered—makes Jean-Carlos giddy and lightheaded, like how it feels to wake up to a snow day.

  Norman with his new jeans and wonderful, little lunches. His mother packs him sandwiches in fancy food-preserving bags and writes him notes that say, Normy: have a nice day, honey, you’re so smart and so good and Dad and I love you so much. Jean-Carlos knows this because he takes Norman’s lunch sometimes when he doesn’t have his own. Jean-Carlos’s mother used to pack him Thanksgiving-sized lunches in brown paper bags, but now she’s always sleepy and forgets to do things like bring food home.

  He saves every one of Norman’s notes. Uncreases them if they’re creased and crosses Norman’s name out to write his own in its place. Jean-Carlos: have a nice day, honey, you’re so smart and so good and Dad and I love you so much.

  A snapping sound; a crunch of cartilage and bone. Norman clutches at his face, but it’s all blood. Blood eyes and blood cheeks and blood tongue. He’s trying to beg. “Please,” he gurgles through the goop in the back of his throat, “Please stop . . . please stop.” But Jean-Carlos keeps kicking him in the braces. Snow soaks the warm blood, melting it so deep a clump of dirty, frozen grass pokes through.

  It feels like nothing if you close your eyes, Jean-Carlos thinks, like kicking a fence.

  A front tooth cracks beneath its metal cage and spills from Norman’s mouth on a string of red mucus, almost delicate in its descent.

  “Have a nice day, Normy,” Jean-Carlos says. “You’re so smart. You’re so good. You’re so smart. So good.”

  • • •

  Norman raises his hand at every question in Algebra and gets every answer correct. He already gets stupid notes in his lunches. He already makes people proud. Jean-Carlos knows all of the answers too, but does not raise his hand even once because it’s already Norman’s show. When this happens, something in him starts to crack and he can feel little shards of it piecing away from the whole, growing into a separate universe of grievances inside of him. He is afraid of what will come out if he tries to speak. So he does not try.

  And today, Jean-Carlos didn’t plan it but found himself following Norman after class—across Main Street and past the rows of sheet-metal shacks that line Forsythe Ave—to the elementary school where Norman goes to collect his younger sister. She must get notes every day in her freezer-pack lunch bag, too. He tracked behind Norman, bootless in the snow, the cold wetness licking up his calves that will leave white sodium rings around his stolen new jeans when they dry.

  As they neared the elementary school, Jean-Carlos heard laughter from a different realm rising up around him. Children’s voices that triggered a maddening memory, that released a violent urge. So as Norman walked the little shrub-lined path leading to the school, Jean-Carlos came at him from behind and tackled him—just out of sight from the teachers and crossing guards—pushing him onto his back into the snow.

  And as he did, Jean-Carlos felt his now-slender body grow thick again, his belly blossoming as it had as a child when he devoured crinkly bags of oily pork rinds and half-stale blocks of fudge.

  But he is better than that now. He can pick locks and throw bricks through cars windows. At thirteen, Jean-Carlos already has a mustache so t
hick and lustrous a junior with giant gazungas named Lisa-Mo Leesa once told him she thought he was sixteen—while baby-fat, one-eyed Norman has no mustache at all. It doesn’t matter that Norman’s mom scrawls him notes every single morning that say the same thing, over and over again, because now his face is half-broken, his glass eye stuck into a raw socket of his skull.

  So. Kick. Smart. Kick. So. Kick. Good. Kick. So good, Norman. Kick. So smart. Kick.

  “No,” Norman gurgles. “Jean-Carlos, please. W-why? Stop . . . why are you—” His mouth is slung open. He cannot form words that sound like words.

  How can Jean-Carlos explain as he kicks Norman’s face in that you do things because you can? Because once, I couldn’t. Because, once, these things were done to me. But Jean-Carlos does not tell him; instead he says everything with the frozen tip of his tennis shoe. Kick, kick, kick. He tries not to return to that memory—tries to kick his way out of it, but it finds him anyway—that day in the third grade at the Claude E. Williams School for the Potentially Future Gifted. It was the single day everything he used to be was burned out of him, and he got to choose what kind of boy he would become when he emerged from the ash, rebuilt.

  • • •

  That morning he woke from a dream which felt very, very long. An underwater dream that sometimes repeated itself and which he enjoyed because, otherwise, he had no opportunities to swim or speak with sharks. He remembers creeping into the cold bathroom, brushing his teeth and dressing, kissing his mother lightly on each of her cheeks before walking to school.

  Classes at the C. E. Williams School for the P.F.G. crept gently on.

  The art project that day involved silhouettes of clown-jesters. Construction paper and glue. Jean-Carlos’s more closely resembled a bug-eyed monster with one large, front tooth. His teacher declared it abstract and hung it proudly on the blackboard. It started out a good day. He was praised, patted on the head like a puppy dog, and he liked the way that felt.

  He was eight years old and chubby. He wore high-waisted jeans his mother dug out of the one-dollar bin at the Salvation Army. When class time transitioned into recess, he could not be concerned about the kickball game going on without him, though he would not have been invited to participate even if he were.