First, Body

by Melanie Rae Thon

  How can Elena judge him? She lives in his house on the hill. Drives his blue Mazda. Drinks his Courvoisier.

  There should be bars on these windows. That’s what Iris says. Iris says, You’re a hostage — just like me.

  The boy who snatched Elena’s purse is fifty-seven dollars richer tonight and still soaked, still shivering, looking for a place to sleep. But tonight, thanks to Elena, he’s not hungry. He’s gorged himself: three burgers, a chocolate milkshake. He can smoke all he wants, one cigarette after another, no rationing. He has money for a second pack and a third one in the morning. Tonight, Elena thinks, he almost forgives me.

  This is the totem pole, Pioneer Square, two days later: raven and otter squat one on top of the other, mindless in the wind and rain.

  No wild children here, just trembling men with broken teeth. They have hands like Elena’s father’s. Unsteady. They drink from bottles in paper bags. Leave green glass splintered in the street.

  Elena sips cappuccino in a warm Café. Three-dollar cup of foam. That’s what Iris would say. Iris makes her want to leave this place.

  Outside, they’re starving.

  Outside, the sky’s gone yellow.

  Elena leans into the wind because she lacks weight. In every stoop she sees an old man’s face.

  Do the men with cracked skin care how she wastes her money? No. Do they sputter or beg? No. They murmur. Three dollars. Nothing.

  Then she spots him, the boy again, her little thief. He’s found her already, miles from the Ave., here at the other end of the city.

  Not him, but one like him.

  Just another boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a black jacket.

  He crouches in a cul-de-sac. Drenched. He’s been expecting her. He grins. Yes, it’s me, he says. Not out loud. Not in a way that anyone besides Elena hears. Tiny hands slip through her ribcage. Wind blows through her chest.

  They hate us.

  All these lost kids.

  She walks fast. Cars spray water from her ankles to her neck. She catches her own reflection in wavy glass, listens to her own heels click on cement.

  At the car, she sees how stupid she’s been. Her door, unlocked. She’s asking for it. Years ago, before Geoff, there were boys in her father’s orchard, brown hands on white wrists. Their tongues in her mouth were the only words they shared.

  She married Geoff to stop all that. Her dangerous self-forgetting. Her accidents.

  Now that smell is in her car. Smoke and spit, something damp and too familiar, the leaves where she lay down, played dead. She’s afraid to check the back seat or glance in the rearview mirror. If she looks, she thinks she’ll conjure one of them. Fruit picker’s son. Migrant. Her father told her he’d throttle any daughter he caught with one of them. Throttle. When he said the word, his hands in air gripped an imaginary neck.

  Elena’s home again. That safe house on the hill.

  The boy’s across the water, trapped on the other side of the bridge. No one can touch her. No father will call to curse or raise his fist. She chooses when to go to him. Poor old man, lost in his own front yard. Kind nurses lead him to his door again and again. Where’s Esther? he says. He forgets his wife is dead. Sometimes he calls and calls, then weeps when she won’t answer him. He thinks three nurses who come in shifts are all the same man. They have skin murky as nights in the orchard. You could disappear in them. Daddy’s nurses have big thighs, thick chests. The better to lift you, my dear. Her father’s thin but still heavy. She imagines bowels full of stones, Daddy digging rocks, eating fast. The nurses call him Baby. Cut his meat in tiny bits. Change his soiled pants.

  If you wait long enough, everyone you fear will come to this.

  Elena stares out the window, watching green clouds scud and swell. Two messages on the machine. Geoffrey says he’s working late. Sorry, sweetheart. Iris says, My ride split. She might be stranded, might sleep in a shelter on the Ave. This is as kind as Iris gets. She means, Don’t worry. I’m not down in the jungle yet.

  Waves of rain break hard on glass. Elena runs from room to room, popping lights, rolling towels along the sills, but the rain has no heart, no shape it has to keep, no head — the rain flows through every crack. She wants Iris to call again. Please come. She’d go anywhere. Yes, even in this. When the phone rings at last, it’s only Geoff. He can’t get home. Pileup on the bridge. He’ll have to sleep at the office. He says, I’ll call you back.

  But this never happens.

  An hour later the whole hill goes dark; the phone goes dead.

  Now it’s Elena and the storm. The two of them. She torches last night’s candles. Shadows jump against the walls. Elena’s jittery hand. Elena’s own head. She hasn’t eaten all day. She could make hot chocolate. The stove’s gas. She pours two shots of Chivas in her mug instead.

  Windows flex and clatter. The house throbs with her body: she’s the pounding heart in it. Shrubs scritch and slap. Limbs snap. Limbs tear. She thinks of the men from the square, wonders if they crawled into dumpsters and closed the lids.

  Somewhere a door slams. Iris blown home? This is Elena’s prayer. In the kitchen, the back screen flaps. When she tries to latch it, a gust rips it from her hands. Hinges shear. Pellets hit her face, icy rain, tiny stones tossed by a tiny fist. The boy, she thinks, he’s out there. Voices roar in the whirlwind, all the lost children rising out of mud and grass.

  Is she drunk already? Skinny woman, empty stomach — she tells herself that’s all it is.

  Another door bangs below her, the one from garage to basement. Please, God, make it Iris. She stands at the top of the stairs and calls. No answer, only that smell of feral cat.

  She takes her bottle to the couch, doesn’t bother with the mug. Candles gutter and flare. The animal follows, marks its territory, sprays its scent. She feels it heave in the leather beneath her thighs and back. Someone’s sewn its torn chest. Someone’s filled its belly with blood and gas.

  She drifts. Dreams the creature on top of her. Crushing air from her lungs. Pinching veins in her neck. This beast has a thick hide and six hands. He’s heavy as three men. Feathers slap her face. Then it’s only the boy. Small, hard. The one from the Ave. The one from the square. The child. Little fingers too short to grip her neck. But he has his knife. And he’s so fast.

  Then it’s Iris. White face, purple mouth. Iris with her sharp hips. Shaking her wet hair. Iris so close they take the same breath. Iris says, You know why I came back?

  She jolts awake. Alone. It’s her own body that makes the couch warm. Her sweat. It’s her own small fist shoved in her mouth. Her own will that keeps her silent.

  In the kitchen, a simple click. The refrigerator door opened and closed. Could it be that harmless? Iris willing to eat her food at last? No. Iris drinks coffee with cream. Eats salsa and chips. Once a day. Never here. The one in the kitchen cracks four eggs in a quart of milk, shakes three times, guzzles it. He tears off chunks of sausage with his pointy teeth. The better to eat you, he says.

  Please, she thinks, make it quick. She remembers all those forbidden boys — black hair, dirty hands — Mexicans who picked fruit in her father’s orchards; Indians who worked for nobody, who never would, that’s what her father said; almost blue boys who sat on mailboxes, who pretended not to see the girl hiding in her pale skin, who said things she couldn’t understand as she passed, low things, tender threats, murmurs that made her feel flushed and damp, curses that made her want to beg forgiveness. I’ll throttle you. If I ever catch you with a boy like that. So she was with the clean white boys in the field. Drinking rum. And it was dark. And there was no color anywhere. So it was safe. And they were nice boys, sons of her father’s friends, boys she’d known since kindergarten, boys who were going to college next year. So how could she explain their hands on her, the marks they left, fingerprints on soft flesh, green bruises, arms gripped? How could she explain red marks on her neck and breasts? How could she go home and who could she blame and who would her father throttle if she confess
ed?

  Later she thought she made it up. Just a bad dream, a hot wind full of dust. The next night she sat at the dinner table, moving her fork to her mouth, chewing, swallowing, as if eating still made sense.

  Where was Mother?

  In the bathroom with the door locked, lying in the tub, water so deep she could float.

  Where was Little Sister?

  In the kitchen getting Daddy another scotch and milk.

  Years later little Julie was the one. Just like Elena. High in the parched hills above Yakima. Laughing, drunk. Then she was crying, clawing at the ground.

  No one’s ever going to hear her.

  No one’s ever going to come.

  These sisters keep their silence forever. Each pretending the other doesn’t know.

  How did Elena guess? She sat awake all night watching shooting stars flame out. Near dawn, Little Sister climbed in the window down the hall. Elena heard the shower pound and pound; she remembered her own skin, imagined Julie naked, scrubbing herself raw till scalding water ran ice cold.

  Tonight Elena lies in another house, safe from her sister’s voice, deaf to words never said out loud: If you knew, why didn’t you help? How many years since Julie climbed in that window? Decades now. How many months since they’ve spoken on the phone? Elena can’t remember, doesn’t want to count. Julie has three ex-husbands and four children lost. The last time she called, Julie said the kids were still in foster care but she’d gotten sober, found God.

  This time it’s not her sister sneaking in the window. Not her sister rattling doors in this house.

  It’s the boy. She’s sure. Wet dog. The smell in the back seat all along. Yes, you brought him here yourself.

  She crawls. She still has this advantage. It’s her house. She knows its obstacles. She scrambles to the stairs, where she can close one more door, slide one more bolt.

  She can trap herself. Lie down in the tub. Roll under the bed. Squat in the closet.

  She can make herself very small.

  She can slip into Geoffrey’s suit and shoes, pretend to be someone else. She can plead for mercy, make bargains, talk to Julie’s God. She can swear she’ll never tell. I forget your face already.

  She can say, Take anything you want.

  The boy roars with laughter.

  He says, Thanks, I will.

  His voice fills her lungs like God. He holds all the cards. He has no reason to make deals with stupid girls.

  But what does he want with her body? And what will he do with her blood?

  This is where she finally goes: into the attic under the eaves, the coldest place, the cobwebbed peak of the house. It’s the last place he’ll look. Birds flap against a tiny window. Pigeons, swallows, gulls. They tap, all beak and claw. She could save them, cover her fist to break a hole. But she’s afraid they’ve gone mad in the storm. Afraid they’ll peck her apart.

  There’s a trunk half full of sweaters where she lies down, deep in the smell of cedar, wrapped in Mother’s frayed quilt.

  She hopes the boy finds the bottle of Chivas by the couch and drinks it all. She hopes he finds Geoffrey’s Goldschläger, twenty-four-karat flakes swirling in schnapps. She dreams veins full of metal, heart clogged with gold. She imagines morning, finding the boy curled on the floor, kneeling beside him, tying him with twine and scarves. She’ll wait for him to wake. She’ll say, Let me take you home.

  The house erupts. The boy hears this thought. Home. His voice is exploding glass, a tree limb torn.

  He says, I had a mother once, stupid as you are now.

  The boy says, I have names, things people call me, words my mother gave me — my father’s name, as if she always planned to throw me out.

  Boys call me one thing.

  Girls call me another.

  But in my head I say these names: Ice, Mud, River.

  I have enemies: the kid who owned this jacket, the rain tonight, my own memory.

  Don’t touch me when I’m sleeping.

  I hate fingers in my hair, fat women, the smell of baby powder.

  I have a knife inside a secret pocket.

  Surprise me and I’ll kill you.

  I need gloves, a blanket, a place to lie down, a hole to hide me.

  I don’t like birds. They scare me. All that noise. Their hunger. They remind me that I’m hungry.

  I don’t like dogs. They make me bark. They make me want to bite them.

  I killed a cat once. Not on purpose. But later I wasn’t sorry. It startled me, my hands around it, the way it twitched, the way it stopped twitching.

  Mostly I hate pigeons, rats with wings — and squirrels, rats with bushy tails.

  When I’m alone, I hate the sound in my own veins, the way it fills the room, like God whispering.

  I love the dark, the sewer, the closet — all the places I’m invisible.

  I love the water when it’s deep and wants to drown me.

  I love the bottle in my hand, green glass, jagged edges. I love my cut palms, warm blood when it turns thick as pudding.

  I love the bridge when the wind is cold and I’m almost jumping.

  I love your house, the way locks burst and doors open.

  I love the smell of rum and chocolate, my sticky fingers.

  I love these walls so much I leave my handprints.

  Am I really here?

  I am if you believe it.

  I love the way I scare you, the way my heart becomes your heart, the way our pulse surges.

  The boy cries at every door, Mother. Elena remembers Iris shut in the upstairs bedroom. Iris wailing. She remembers hiding in the basement, in the bathroom, with the water drumming.

  So I wouldn’t hear her.

  She was afraid of her own daughter, two months old, Iris whimpering. She was afraid of tiny arms and fragile fingers. Afraid of herself, what she might do to stop this squalling.

  She locked all the doors between them.

  The boy howls. He knows this. He says, Put your hand on my head, feel how flat the back is.

  Yes, she understands. If you leave a child long enough, the soft bones of the skull will flatten.

  He says, No wonder we hate you.

  Elena whispers, But that didn’t happen. Elena says, Iris has a perfect head, a lovely curve — I didn’t hurt her.

  The boy laughs. The boy says, You think I don’t know that?

  The boy says, You think I haven’t touched her?

  He says, She lived in the jungle eight days last summer. I remember her voice. She’s sweet, your Iris. But mostly it’s her throat I remember. So white I wanted to snap it. I wanted to lie down beside her with my eyes closed. I wanted to rub naked against her until her skin was sore and red and mine was healed.

  Why should I be me? Why should she be Iris?

  One night she must have heard me. My thoughts. She must have dreamed the words inside me. The next day she disappeared. Came home. To you. To this house. Not because she loves you. Only because I scare her. She’ll get over that. Don’t think that you can keep her.

  The boy says, She told us where you live, how easy it would be to rob you. He says, When I saw you on the Ave. that day, I knew we were meant to be together.

  Elena wants to tell the boy, Everybody suffers. Wants to say that children who live in cars and children who live in castles sit awake all night watching stars, wondering why meteors don’t set the earth on fire. Children everywhere wonder why their mothers refuse to answer. Children lie in the grass, waiting for fathers who never come to save them.

  The boy is very practical. The boy says, You sleep in the car. I’ll sleep in the castle. He says, You eat from the dumpster. I’ll eat your salmon and raspberries. He says, I’ll lie under the down comforter. You can stuff your pants with newspaper.

  He says, Maybe you’re right. He says, Maybe I’ll still suffer. He says, I’m willing to try it.

  He hasn’t been this warm in years. He says, I think I’d like to die here. He says, We die every night in the jungle. Las
t week it was a migrant. One of those fools who forgot to go south for the winter. He ended up with us instead, under the freeway, in a house made of sticks and cardboard. He was hacking yellow phlegm and bleeding from his asshole. Maybe you’re right. When it comes to this, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the car or in the castle. On the white bed or the cold vinyl. But if I had my choice, I’d stay in your house forever.

  We didn’t let him die in the dirt. We made a bed of leaves, wrapped our hands in rags to lift him. Someone covered him with a silver blanket. Our astronaut.

  He asked us to find the sin-eater. Who knows how many of us there are? Ten thousand in this city? But we found her, the one he wanted, shriveled-up old spook of a woman. She came and sat beside him. Ate everything we brought her — boiled cat, raw fish, roasted squirrel. She swelled and swelled. Choked down his evil. Drank gallons of water. Belched and farted. She chewed till her eyes rolled and she toppled over. We thought his sins had killed her. All that meat, his poison. She slept two days. Foul. We had to tie shirts over our noses. The man burned. Riding that horse. No one could stop him. But his body wanted to stay with us. It breathed and bled. It snorted. Once its eyes opened.

  On the third day, the sin-eater woke. Small again. Her withered self. Wind blew through the stick house. Rain washed us. We smelled like the ocean, salt and seaweed. We were clean, in a way, as clean as we can be. Our astronaut was wet and cool. His blanket shimmered like liquid silver. We wrapped it around him. A girl with little hands sewed it shut with tiny stitches.

  That night we carried him to the highway and left him on the shoulder. We were too tired to dig a hole. And there are too many of us to bury. We could dig all day every day, turn this jungle to a graveyard.

  If you leave a dead man on the road, someone always takes him.

  He disappeared at daybreak.

  We have this kind of magic.

  When it was dark again, the silver blanket burst above me. A billion stars exploded. I was afraid. I thought it was his body breaking. If blood splattered in my eyes and mouth, I’d be the next one dying. But there were only stars and the black sky between them.