by Anne Rice
My grannie would call this dirt goofer dust; any soil that’s been piled on a corpse, whether the body’s in a box or just loose like me, turns into goofer dust. Dirt next to dead folk gets a power in it, she used to say.
She used to tell me all kinds of things. She told me about the walking dead; but mostly she said they were just big scary dummies who obeyed orders. When I stayed up too late at night reading library books under my covers with a flashlight, she would say, “Maybe you know somebody who could give those nightwalkers orders. Maybe she can order ‘em to come in here and turn off your light.”
She had started to train me in recognizing herbs and collecting conjo ingredients, but that was before I told the preacher what really happened when I sat in Grand-père’s lap, and Grand-père got in trouble with the church and then with other people in the Parish. I had a lot of cousins, and some of the others started talking up about Grand-père, but I was the first. After the police took Grand-père away, Grannie laid a curse on me: “May you love the thing that hurts you, even after it kills you.” She underlined it with virgin blood, the wax of black candles, and the three of spades.
I thought maybe if I left Louisiana I could get the curse off, but nobody. I knew could uncross me and the curse followed me to Seattle.
In the midst of what was now goofer dust, I was sitting next to something. I reached out and touched it. It was another dead body. “Wake up,” I said to the woman in the shallow grave beside me. But she refused to move.
So: no fingerprints, no teeth. I was dead, next to someone even deader, and off in some woods. I checked in with my body, an act I saved for special times when I could come out of the numb state I spent most of my life in, and found I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. All the parts of me that had been hurting just before Richie, my last trick, took a final twist around my neck with the nylon cord he was so fond of, all those parts were quiet, not bothering me at all; but there was a burning desire in my crotch, and a pinprick of fire behind my eyes that whispered to me, “Get up and move. We know where to go.”
I looked around. At my back the slope led upward toward a place where sun broke through trees. At my feet it led down into darker woods. To either side, more woods and bushes, plants Grannie had never named for me, foreign as another language.
I moved my legs, bringing them up out of the goofer dust. All of me was naked; dirt caught in my curly hair below. I pulled myself to my feet and something fell out of my money pit, as my pimp, Blake, liked to call my pussy. I looked down at what had fallen from me. It was a rock flaked and shaped into a blade about the size of a flat hand, and it glistened in the dulled sunlight, wet and dark with what had come from inside me, and maybe with some of his juices too.
The fire in my belly flared up, but it wasn’t a feeling like pain; it felt like desire.
I put my hands to my neck and felt the deep grooves the rope had left there. Heat blossomed in my head and in my heart. I wanted to find the hands that had tightened the rope around my neck, wrists, and ankles. I wanted to find the eyes that had watched my skin sizzle under the kiss of the burning cigarette. I wanted to find the mind that had decided to plunge a crude blade into me like that. The compulsion set in along my bones, jetted into my muscles like adrenaline. I straightened, looked around. I had to find Richie. I knew which direction to look: something in my head was teasing me, nudging me—a fire behind my eyes, urging me back to the city.
I fought the urge and lifted more branches off the place where I had lain. If I was going to get to Seattle from here, wherever here was, I needed some clothes. I couldn’t imagine anybody stopping to pick me up with me looking the way I did. I knew Richie had worked hard to get rid of all clues to who I was, but I thought maybe my companion in the grave might not be so naked of identity, so I brushed dirt off her, and found she was not alone. There were two bodies in the dirt, with no sign of afterlife in them except maggots, and no trace of clothes. One was darker than me, with fewer marks on her but the same rope burns around her neck. The other one was very light, maybe white. She was really falling apart. They looked like they must smell pretty bad, but I couldn’t smell them. I couldn’t smell anything. I could see and hear, and my muscles did what I told them, but I didn’t feel much except the gathering fire inside me that cried for Richie.
I brushed dirt back over the other women and moved the branches to cover their resting place again.
Downslope the trees waited, making their own low-level night. Upslope, open sun: a road, probably. I scrambled up toward the light.
The heat in my head and heart and belly burned hotter, and I churned up the hillside and stepped into the sun.
A two-lane highway lay before me, its yellow dotted center stripe bright in the sun. Its edges tailed into the gravel I stood on. Crushed snack bags and Coke and beer cans lay scattered in the bushes beside the road; cellophane glinted. I crossed the road and looked at the wooded hill on its far side, then down in the ditch. No clothes. Not even a plastic bag big enough to make into a bikini bottom.
The heat inside me was like some big fat drunk who will not shut up, yelling for a beer. I started walking, knowing which direction would take me toward town without knowing how I knew.
After a while a car came from behind me. Behind was probably my best side; my microbraids hung down to hide the marks on my neck, and Richie hadn’t done any cigarette graffiti on my back that I could remember. A lot of tricks had told me I had a nice ass and good legs; even my pimp had said it, and he never said anything nice unless he thought it was true or it would get him what he wanted. And he had everything he wanted from me.
I could hear the car slowing, but I was afraid to look back. I knew my mouth must look funny because of the missing teeth, and I wasn’t sure what the rest of my face looked like. Since I couldn’t feel pain, anything could have happened. I bent my head so the sun wasn’t shining in my face.
“Miss? Oh, miss?” Either a woman’s deep voice came from the car behind me, or a man’s high one; it sounded like an older person. The engine idled low as the car pulled up beside me. It was a red Volkswagen Rabbit.
I crossed my arms over my chest, hiding the burn marks and tucking my rope-mark bracelets into the crooks of my elbows.
“Miss?”
“Ya?” I said, trying to make my voice friendly, not sure I had a voice at all.
“Miss, are you in trouble?”
I nodded, my braids slapping my shoulders and veiling my face.
“May I help you, miss?”
I cleared my throat, drew in breath. “Ya-you goin’ do down?” I managed to say.
“What?”
“Down,” I said, pointing along the road. “Seaddle.”
“Oh. Yes. Would you like a ride?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said. “Cloze?” I glanced up this time, wondering if the car’s driver was man or woman. A man might shed his shirt for me, but a woman, unless she was carrying a suitcase or something, might not have anything to offer.
“Oh, you poor thing, what happened to you?” The car pulled up onto the shoulder ahead of me and the driver got out. It was a big beefy white woman in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. She came toward me with a no-nonsense stride. She had short dark hair. She was wearing a man’s khaki cloth hat with fishing flies stuck in the band, all different feathery colors. “What ha—”
I put one hand over my face, covering my mouth with my palm.
“What happened—” she whispered, stopping while there was still a lot of space between us.
“My boyfriend dreeded me preddy bad,” I said behind my hand. My tongue kept trying to touch the backs of teeth no longer there. It frustrated me that my speech was so messy. I thought maybe I could talk more normally if I touched my tongue to the roof of my mouth. “My boyfriend,” I said again, then, “treated me pretty bad.”
“Poor thing, poor thing,” she whispered, then turned back to the car and rummaged in a back seat, coming up with a short-waisted Levi’s jacket and holding it out
to me.
I ducked my head and took the jacket. She gasped when I dropped my arms from my chest. I wrapped up in the jacket, which was roomy, but not long enough to cover my crotch. Then again, from the outside, my crotch didn’t look so bad. I turned the collar up to cover my neck and the lower part of my face. “Thank you,” I said.
Her eyes were wide, her broad face pale under her tan. “You need help,” she said. “Hospital? Police?”
“Seattle,” I said.
“Medical attention!”
“Won’t help me now.” I shrugged.
“You could get infections, die from septicemia or something. I have a first aid kit in the car. At least let me—”
“What would help me,” I said, “a mirror.”
She sighed, her shoulders lowering. She walked around the car and opened the passenger side door, and I followed her. I looked at the seat. It was so clean, and I was still goofer dusted. “Gonna get it dirty,” I said.
“Lord, that’s the last thing on my mind right now,” she said. “Get in. Mirror’s on the back of the visor.”
I slid in and folded down the visor, sighed with relief when I saw my face. Nothing really wrong with it, except my chin was nearer to my nose than it should be, and my lips looked too dark and puffy. My eyes weren’t blackened and my nose wasn’t broken. I could pass. I gapped the collar just a little and winced at the angry dark rope marks around my neck, then clutched the collar closed.
The woman climbed into the driver’s seat. “My name’s Marti,” she said, holding out a hand. Still keeping the coat closed with my left hand, I extended my right, and she shook it.
“Sheila,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever said it out loud. She. La. Two words for woman put together. I smiled, then glanced quickly at the mirror, and saw that a smile was as bad as I’d thought. My mouth was a graveyard of broken teeth, brown with old blood. I hid my mouth with my hand again.
“Christ!” said Marti. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“If he did that to you, he could do it to others. My daughter lives in Renton. This has to be reported to the police. Who is he? Where does he live?”
“Near Sea-Tac. The airport.”
She took a deep breath, let it out. “You understand, don’t you, this is a matter for the authorities?”
I shook my head. The heat in my chest was scorching, urging me on. “I have to go to town now,” I said, gripping the door handle.
“Put your seat belt on,” she said, slammed her door, and started the car.
Once she got started, she was some ball-of-fire driver. Scared me—even though there wasn’t anything I could think of that could hurt me.
“Where were we, anyway?” I asked after I got used to her tire-squealing cornering on curves.
“Well, I was coming down from Kanaskat. I’m on my way in to Renton to see my daughter. She’s got a belly-dance recital tonight, and—” She stared at me, then shook her head and focused on the road.
The land was leveling a little. We hit a main road, Highway 169, and she turned north on it.
The burning in my chest raged up into my throat. “No,” I said, reaching for her hand on the steering wheel.
“What?”
“No. That way.” I pointed back to the other road we had been on. Actually the urge inside me was pulling from some direction between the two roads, but the smaller road aimed closer to where I had to go.
“Maple Valley’s this way,” she said, not turning, “and we can talk to the police there, and a doctor.”
“No,” I said.
She looked at me. “You’re in no state to make rational decisions,” she said.
I closed my hand around her wrist and squeezed. She cried out. She let go of the steering wheel and tried to shake off my grip. I stared at her and held on, remembering my grand-mère’s tales of the strength of the dead.
“Stop,” I said. I felt strange, totally strange, ordering a woman around the way a pimp would. I knew I was hurting her, too. I knew I could squeeze harder, break the bones in her arm, and I was ready to, but she pulled the car over to the shoulder and stamped on the brake.
“I got to go to Sea-Tac,” I said. I released her arm and climbed out of the car. “Thanks for ride. You want the jacket back?” I fingered the denim.
“My Lord,” she said, “you keep it, child.” She was rubbing her hand over the wrist I had gripped. She heaved a huge sigh. “Get in. I’ll take you where you want to go. I can’t just leave you here.”
“Your daughter’s show?” I said.
“I’ll phone. We’re going someplace with phones, aren’t we?”
I wasn’t sure exactly where we would end up. I would know when we arrived…. I remembered the inside of Richie’s apartment. But that was later. First he had pulled up next to where I was standing by the highway, rolled down the passenger window of his big gold four-door Buick, said he’d like to party and that he knew a good place. Standard lines, except I usually told johns the place, down one of the side streets and in the driveway behind an abandoned house. I had asked him how high he was willing to go. My pimp had been offering me coke off and on but I’d managed not to get hooked, so I was still a little picky about who I went with; but Richie looked clean-cut and just plain clean, and his car was a couple years old but expensive; I thought he might have money.
“I want it all,” Richie had said. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”
I climbed into his car.
He took me down off the ridge where the Sea-Tac Strip is to a place like the one where I usually took my tricks, behind one of the abandoned houses near the airport that are due to be razed someday. There’s two or three neighborhoods of them handy. I asked him for money and he handed me a hundred, so I got in back with him, but then things went seriously wrong. That was the first time I saw and felt his rope, the first time I heard his voice cursing me, the first time I tasted one of his sweaty socks, not the worst thing I’d ever tasted, but close.
When he had me gagged and tied up and shoved down on the back seat floor, he drove somewhere else. I couldn’t tell how long the drive was; it felt like two hours but was probably only fifteen or twenty minutes. I could tell when the car drove into a parking garage because the sounds changed. He put a shopping bag over my head and carried me into an elevator, again something I could tell by feel, and then along a hall to his apartment. That was where I learned more about him than I had ever wanted to know about anybody.
I didn’t know his apartment’s address, but I knew where Richie was. If he was at the apartment, I would direct Marti there even without a map. The fire inside me reached for Richie like a magnet lusting for a hammer.
Shaping words carefully, I told Marti, “Going to the Strip. Plenty of phones.”
“Right,” she said.
“On the other road.” I pointed behind us.
She sighed. “Get in.”
I climbed into the car, and she waited for an RV to pass, then pulled out and turned around.
As soon as we were heading the way I wanted to go, the fire inside me cooled a little. I sat back and relaxed.
“Why are we going to the—to the Strip?” she asked. “What are you going to do when we get there?”
“Don’t know,” I said. We were driving toward the sun, which was going down. Glare had bothered me before my death, but now it was like dirt in my eyes, a minor annoyance. I blinked and considered this, then shrugged it off.
“Can’t you even tell me your boyfriend’s name?” she asked.
“Richie.”
“Richie what?”
“Don’t know.”
“Are you going back to him?”
Fire rose in my throat like vomit. I felt like I could breathe it out and it would feel good. It felt good inside my belly already. I was drunk with it. “Oh, yes,” I said.
“How can you?” she cried. She shook her head. “I can’t take you back to som
eone who hurt you so much.” But she didn’t stop driving.
“I have to go back,” I said.
“You don’t. You can choose something else. There are shelters for battered women. The government should offer you some protection. The police….”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“I do,” she said. Her voice got quieter. “I know what it’s like to live with someone who doesn’t respect you. I know how hard it is to get away. But you are away, Sheila. You can start over.”
“No,” I said, “I can’t.”
“You can. I’ll help you. You can live in Kanaskat with me and he’ll never find you. Or if you just want a bus ticket someplace—back home, wherever that is—I can do that for you, too.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
She was quiet for a long stretch of road. Then she said, “Help me understand.”
I shook my braids back and opened the collar of the jacket, pulled down the lapels to bare my neck. I stared at her until she looked back.
She screamed and drove across the center lane. Fortunately there was no other traffic. Still screaming, she fought with the steering wheel until she straightened out the car. Then she pulled over to the shoulder and jumped out of the car, running away.
I shut off the car’s engine, then climbed out. “Marti,” I yelled. “Okay, I’m walking away now. The car’s all yours. I’m leaving. It’s safe. Thanks for the jacket. Bye.” I buttoned up the jacket, put the collar up, buried my hands in the pockets, and started walking along the road toward Richie.
I had gone about about a quarter mile when she caught up with me again. The sun had set and twilight was deepening into night. Six cars had passed going my way, but I didn’t hold out my thumb, and though some kid had yelled out a window at me, and somebody else had honked and swerved, nobody stopped.
It had been so easy to hitch before I met Richie. Somehow now I just couldn’t do it.
I heard the Rabbit’s sputter behind me and kept walking, not turning to look at her. But she slowed and kept pace with me. “Sheila?” she said in a hoarse voice. “Sheila?”
I stopped and looked toward her. I knew she was scared of me. I felt strong and strange, hearing her call me by a name I had given myself, as if I might once have had a chance to make up who I was instead of being shaped by what had happened to me. I couldn’t see it being possible now, though, when I was only alive to do what the fire in me wanted.
