X
I
The man who finds her stands with the moon over his shoulder, his slim silhouette a hole in the desert night-sky; he’s darker than the greater darkness surrounding them because he blocks the stars.
“Why are you in my yard?” he asks. “Can I help you?” He crouches as he speaks, still two-dimensional. Her bald head is cold, her throat dry.
“Sick,” she says, which is a kind of truth. “Cancer,” she whispers, which is a lie to explain her baldness. “Attacked,” she says, a second lie, this to explain the dried blood on her thighs that streaks to her bare feet.
A pair of hands emerges from the silhouette and slides under her. Only after she’s hoisted—as easily as if she’s the husk of something—does she feel the shape of the rocks she’s been lying on. She’s swung away from the moon, wants to see it, but hasn’t the strength to turn her head.
She wakes swathed in cool sheets on a bed in a lit room. Poster-sized artwork covers stucco walls. Her abdomen aches. She touches herself, peers under the sheets that are so white they seem fluorescent. Crusts of blood edge her wounds, but the blood has been washed off. Red spots startle her—just the polish on her toenails; she’s not hemorrhaging. But when she hears a male voice, pain wracks her. The speaker stands in the door-less entry to the room. He is tan, with hair like straw. The voice and thin body match those of her rescuer. He won’t allow his gaze to shift from her eyes. His are blue.
“I washed and cleaned your wounds. You stopped bleeding. I haven’t called an ambulance or notified the authorities. Do you want me to?”
She remembers—before she’d become too dizzy with pain and exhaustion to think straight, she’d created the beginning of a story: she was sick, the narrative went—cancer; she’d been on her way to Mexico City on the promise of an alternative treatment when she’d gotten lost on a side road, and her car broke down; a gang of young men in a beat-up car stopped to help; though she was suspicious, the day was so hot and the road so empty that she had no choice but to accept. What rescuer, seeing the blood, wouldn’t believe that she’d been assaulted? Who wouldn’t marvel at the will to survive demonstrated by her courageous escape? And she had run—that much was true—but she’d lost consciousness before coming up with a reason why the police should not be summoned.
The man in the doorway purses his lips—he isn’t young—age spots mark his hairline, and his leathery face is deeply creased. His beard is so white it makes his teeth look stained.
“You’ve been on television. We’re less than a hundred miles over the border, and I get American TV. They know who you are. The child you gave birth to is healthy. A boy. Did you know that? Did you see? Before you ran? If you’re hungry, I’ve got soup, Mindy—your name is Mindy something, right?”
“Water, please,” Mindy whispers, admitting nothing. Screaming has left her painfully hoarse.
“Beside you.” The man nods to the glass on a night table, and when Mindy reaches for it, her ribs ache and her thighs cramp. What’s the right play here? Should she hide her pain or exaggerate it? But when she tries to lift the water, her palm stings, and she sets the cup back down with a short cry. She looks at the heel of her hand, the heels of both hands—tiny puncture wounds—her nails had done that when she clenched her fists? She picks up the glass in her finger tips and drinks. The water sears her throat like cool fire.
“You said ‘Cancer,’” the man says. His voice echoes—the floor is tiled, the ceiling high with track lights to illuminate the pictures. Mindy reaches for her bald head. How much does this man know? Does he know there’s no chemo, that she’s hairless because of alopecia? Does he know that she’s not perfectly smooth? Patches surface: one on her thigh, another under her arm, and an inch wide strip that runs front to back on her head like an off-center bird’s crest. Almost perfect—being absolutely hairless would be divine, but her patches are an insult. Shaving herself smooth has been a lifelong chore. Her fingers ease over her scalp until—bristles. When she groans, her empty uterus spasms.
“The reporter on the news said, ‘Look for a young woman in a yellow raincoat. It might be blood-stained. She could be wearing a wig, because she doesn’t grow hair.’ Did you lose the wig?” The man shakes his head and lowers his voice. “Cancer is something you shouldn’t fake,” he says, as if that pretense is the worst of her crimes.
Mindy feels her nostrils dilate. An instinct tells her to escape, but she knows her body wouldn’t obey if she were to try to run. Where would she go? Her eyes glide around the room, over the pictures—searching for an exit. Large windows, three on the wall to her left, one on the wall in front of her, are set above the pictures, too high to reach and black because it’s night. To her right is a small bathroom—she sees a shower stall, a sink, and toilet— no window or door. The only way into or out of the room is through the doorway that frames her host.
“Don’t call anyone,” she says. “I just need rest. Where am I?”
“You’re where you fled to. No one expected you to run. You confused the border patrol. They underestimated your strength. But they found your bag and ID, Mindy, and your gun. They’re looking for the man whose vehicle got you to the border. They know he was your doctor. They assume he was your accomplice. He must not be a very brave man to leave you alone.”
He’s dead, Mindy remembers. I kidnapped him back home—to drive, and in case I started labor early—and I shot him in an arroyo when we got close to the border. No one will ever find him. But she’d miscalculated her needs—her first contraction came just moments after she pulled the trigger—the gunshot had been so loud she had nothing in her experience to compare it to. She thought she could still make it over the border to her Mexican connections. And they did find her, too late, somehow recognizing her yellow raincoat as she dodged through traffic. When they swept her into their black-windowed car, she was empty-armed and exhausted.
“Where is the baby?” they’d demanded as she gasped and bled over a creamy leather seat. The man in back with her offered her his handkerchief. She thought they’d shoot her, but instead they drove and drove, on shrinking, rutted roads, until the red sun dropped behind scorched hills, and they pushed her out of the car.
“Call us when you got something, puta,” she heard, before the car spun off, spitting pebbles.
“Hungry,” she says. When her host—captor?—cleaned her, he’d have wiped away her drawn-on eyebrows. What had he thought as he erased her rakish expression? What else had he noticed? Certainly the drops of mother’s milk tattooed beneath her nipple that some of her lovers mistook for tears. And the whole world now knows she’s smooth. Did her bristly patches confuse him? She would rather shave than eat, but she won’t ask for a razor—he might think her desperate and dangerous. Where are the mirrors? None even over the bathroom sink. Just pictures, everywhere.
“Soup,” the man says, “but—” Before he can finish, something bursts between his legs, streaks across the floor, and leaps onto Mindy’s bed—a speckled, piglet-sized dog with radar-dish ears and blazing eyes. Its sudden weight rocks her and wakes her pain.
“Mee-go!” Mindy hears as she covers her face and lifts her knees, her last sight a lolling tongue between grinning jaws. The snorting creature digs with eager paws at the sheet between her legs and tries to tug it away, and Mindy screams as if she’s giving birth again.
II
“I find that I’m a different person in different rooms of my house,” Claude says without looking up from the wooden tablet he cuts into with one of his knives. Every morning he brings a tablet, a portable work table, a folding chair, and a leather case of carving tools into Mindy’s sunlit bedroom. While he works, Mindy often gazes up at the windows, waiting for a bird, an airplane, even a cloud to pass. When something does float by—or when it rains, and the glass seems to melt—Mindy’s heart beats faster, as if she’s about to learn a secret. Then the windows return to rectangles of skim mil
k blue or white or gray. At night they’re always black. Beneath the windows the pictures—prints made from woodblocks, she’s been informed—are bright with colors, but Mindy focuses on the figures in them only when Claude points them out.
This morning she’s staring at the carving tool in Claude’s hand. When he lifts it, her eyes trace its path as if it’s a magic wand. The blade reminds her that she hasn’t shaved her excess hair for over thirty days—since she woke up in this room. She’s marked the passing of time by notching the bedpost with her thumbnail. Claude pares her nails, but not too short to make her marks. Migo curls against Mindy’s thighs, his snout against his hindquarters, as if he’s one of those snakes that swallow themselves.
“I only have this room, so that’s all I am,” Mindy says. She has no idea how many rooms are in this house.
“But you had a life back in the States. You lived somewhere. Who were you then? Always the same, no matter which room?” Claude peers up from his work, his forehead grooved like his tablet. Each woodblock I cut is for a different color of a print, he’s told her. After all are inked and printed onto the paper, the picture is complete. She imagines that Claude is cutting her face and figure into his tablets, and when he inks the print, she’ll be able to see herself. But what he’s actually fashioning are poster-sized versions of the small woodblock prints produced by Yoshitoshi, a nineteenth-century Japanese master of woodblock prints. Claude’s “expansions” hang on Mindy’s walls. You’d be surprised what they sell for, Claude said. Only the most foolish tourists mistake them for originals. But they are original, in a sense. It’s like making a movie out of a book—a different version of the same thing, just bigger. I contribute size.
Rooms? Who was she in the tiny custom’s booth where she disgorged someone else’s child? There was space only for herself and the sweating official between her legs. A roll of unfurling paper towels flew over her, struck one of the windows filled with faces and white and blue uniforms. Pain—a Milky Way of exploding stars—then a wail, and then the blinding sunlight, confused shouts, and car horns.
History: the night before the customs booth, a room at the Blue Daisy Motel with fat Doctor Morrison—Doc Mo. He spent the night chained to the drainpipe under the sink in the bathroom he’d never have guessed would be his final room. Who was Mindy as she dry-shaved her bristling head-strip—for the last time—on the Blue Daisy’s sagging mattress? She’d been someone who thought that the seventy-five thousand dollars awaiting her in Mexico was three times better than the fee she’d contracted for in the States.
III
Migo is blind and deaf, Claude has said, which Mindy never would have guessed. “He knows you by your scent.” Mindy runs her hand along the dog’s rash of spots. His blind eyes glow white—sometimes she strains to see herself in them.
“His name is ‘Amigo,’ but without the ‘a,’” Mindy says as she watches Claude cut into a fresh woodblock with a thin blade. Purple ink from a print run stains his fingers. “Does that mean he is or isn’t a friend?”
Claude’s glance lasts a blink. It’s morning, and Mindy spoons oatmeal sweetened with brown sugar from the bowl on her breakfast tray. Claude prints a few hundred copies of each of his enlargements. The prints he hangs in Mindy’s bedroom are first runs, their colors especially vibrant.
“Friend,” Claude mutters, as if it’s an idea he hasn’t considered. Mindy still doesn’t know if she’s a guest or a prisoner. Since Claude has established no restrictions, if she asks for nothing, then nothing is denied. This is freedom. She’s brought three meals a day, and the bathroom is stocked with shampoo, soap, toothpaste, fresh towels, and the terrycloth robes that are her only clothing. Before Mindy settled in, she wondered if anyone else lived in the house—maybe it’s honey-combed with dozens of chambers just like hers, like a hive. But Claude couldn’t care for so many guests and still spend most of his day in her room, working. She’s free to explore, as far as she knows, and free to inquire, but the curiosity that might prove her freedom a false idea has shriveled. She’s quit counting days—there’s no more room for fresh grooves on her bedposts and headboard, and no point in deepening old ones.
IV
Mindy recognizes two universes—her room and her body. Bored with the windows, she now studies the prints that surround her and leaves her bed to study them. Claude has told her that the Asian men and women featured in the prints represent figures from Chinese and Japanese history, literature, and legend. Today, while Claude works, she lingers before a new print, hoping that Claude will explain it.
“That’s Wu Gang,” he says, putting down his knife. “Because he abused the practice of Taoist magic, he’s doomed to chop down the golden-blossomed cassia trees which give the moon its brightness—every time he cuts down a tree, a new one grows in its place. The print shows Wu Gang resting over his ax. The moon hangs over him, his perpetual burden.”
“That’s like the myth of what’s-his-name,” Mindy says, “the guy who pushed the rock up the hill, and it kept rolling down.”
“Sisyphus,” Claude says. “Same idea.”
Later, alone, Mindy returns to the print of Wu Gang and the moon made of golden flowers. It’s the magician’s ax, not the blossoms, that attracts her. With a blade like his, she could shave off the lengthening hair on her head and the patches on her thigh and under her arm. And if she polished the ax, it could serve as a mirror. She runs her hand over her naked scalp until her fingertips bump against her lop-sided crest. Mindy remembers seeing horses with braided manes, and winds a finger around a lock of crest-hair, thinking of ribbons. It’s a wonder that Claude never mentions her unusual feature, or the two other fuzzy places that mar her smoothness. His only involvement with her appearance is the trimming of her nails.
When Claude slices off Mindy’s nails with one of his cutting tools, he works delicately and quickly with the same intense concentration he gives to his woodblocks. Mindy holds out each hand like the brides she’s seen in wedding ceremonies on TV shows—palm down, fingers spread, in anticipation of the ring. When he’s finished with her nails, Claude shifts back to his work table, while Mindy eats, examines the prints on her wall, or showers.
Mindy often sings while she showers: she runs a bar of soap over her smooth flesh and kinked patches as if she’s shaving and hears in her own voice the sing-song rhythm her mother used when she scraped away her little girl’s unsightly bristles—Sooo-smooth, sooo-smooth. Or Mindy mimics hip-hop performers and sways her hips and slaps her wet ass—mothah-fuckah this and mothah-fucka that—memories and tunes that are rootless and carry only sound. Mindy’s crest-hair has grown long enough to shampoo, and massaging it to a soapy froth delights her. Mine, she thinks, as she squeezes her fists through the foam, all mine.
Often, after showering, when she returns to her bed in a clean, white terrycloth robe, Mindy discovers that Claude has hung new prints. This morning, as she lies back on her pillow, water leaking from her crest down her neck, she notices two.
“Prostitutes,” Claude says with a swipe of his tool in the direction of the prints. “Yoshitoshi called the first ‘Moon of the Pleasure Garden’ and the second ‘Streetwalker at Night.’”
Mindy listens to the titles and tugs her robe to cover her cleavage. Migo, already comfortable against her hip, lifts his head and stares toward her like a blind sphinx. Her first day in this room, the dog had crawled onto her legs, stretched himself along her sore abdomen, and tucked his muzzle under her ripe breasts. He wants my milk, she remembers thinking. Then, as now, she’d thought of the tattooed droplets and clamped her arms over her chest.
“Migo is ugly,” she says.
“Migo is a beautiful and perfectly bred truth,” Claude says, returning a blade to the tool case and selecting another.
“His head comes to a point, like a sharpened pencil. And his spots look like some kind of filthy disease.”
“Both result from generat
ions of street-breeding—the pointy head so he can stick it in tight spaces for trash to eat, the spots for camouflage in trash heaps.”
“He has fishy breath. How did he get here?” It’s the new prints that vex her, not the dog, Mindy knows.
“I found him in my yard with a broken leg. Probably hit by a car. A street dog like him isn’t likely to wander this far away from a populated area, so he’s something of a mystery.”
“Was he blind when you found him?”
“No, but his vision was probably failing, which may be why he got hit. And drivers here often aim for small animals.”
“They hit things on purpose?”
“Dogs, armadillos, tortoises, anything that isn’t likely to damage their vehicle. Not much regard for life.”
Claude finishes for the afternoon, leaving Mindy alone until dinnertime. The sky in the high windows is the washed out blue of the streetwalker’s scarf in one of the new prints. The depiction of this prostitute includes a verse in Japanese, which Claude had translated for Mindy: “Like reflections in the rice paddies—the faces of streetwalkers in the darkness are exposed by the autumn moonlight.” This woman in the print is of the lowest class of prostitutes, and she carries her rolled straw mat along a riverbank. For what purpose will she next roll out the mat, Mindy wonders—to sleep or to ply her trade? Mindy turns from the white-faced streetwalker to the elaborately robed courtesan—lucky enough to reside in “pleasure quarters.” This woman’s face is hidden as she watches cherry blossoms sift from tall trees like moonlit snow. An attending child watches the falling blossoms with her mistress.
What’s to become of this little girl? She’s sure to follow her mistress’s trade, but will she inherit the “pleasure quarters” or will she be dismissed to the streets with a rolled mat? Mindy presses her hand against her stomach, anticipating a pain that doesn’t come.
V
“Can you bring me ribbon?” Mindy asks Claude. It’s the first request she’s made since she’s occupied the room. If she pulls the hair from her crest over her ear, it reaches her jaw. The hair is honey-colored, much lighter than the patches in her armpit and on her thigh. At night she lies on her back and tickles her nose with strands of it. She hopes Claude will bring a pair of sheers made of polished metal with the ribbon—she imagines admiring herself in the blades after she’s decorated her crest. A fragment of a nursery rhyme floats to Mindy like a moth: about Johnny who went to a fair, and, in trade for a kiss, “He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons, to tie up my bonny brown hair.” Mindy blushes at the sudden idea that Claude might think of kissing her. She peeks at his crimped face as he works. He’s so old. Is he frowning because he’s mulling her request for a ribbon? In what ways does she inhabit his thoughts? The eyes of many men she’s known have run over her like thirsty fingers after they’ve learned of her smoothness. To kiss Claude—Mindy watches him bite his lower lip with his stained teeth while he works, and her mouth clogs as if she’s stuffed it with the yolks of hardboiled eggs.
Women of Consequence Page 18
