Crimson Footprints II: New Beginnings

by Shewanda Pugh

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Kenji was loathed to admit that time with Lizzie was fast becoming an addiction. Already, he had plans for what they could do that night, and another, should she decide to keep him company again. Company. He supposed that was one way to put it, even as he pushed aside incendiary thoughts of what her nights without him entailed.

  “Friends,” he said firmly and dialed her number.

  He took her to a tapas bar in Little Havana with standing room only. The bar stood a rich tapestry of overlapping browns with plank wood floors, mahogany paneling, and Spanish chocolate marble for the countertops. Only a handful of patrons mingled at the counter, including a pudgy-face man who plucked slivers of ham and olives from a dish. Lizzie’s gaze swept a room rendered dim by a single overhead light and shot a glance backward at Kenji quizzically. It could’ve been the absence of chairs that caught her eye or the planks of ham that hung behind the counter. Then again, Kenji wagered that the stout bartender grinning and greeting them at the door in a bow tie might’ve been enough to baffle.

  He placed a hand at the small of her back and surveyed the offerings on display. Rich oils, salted meats, and a plethora of cheeses looked back at him. A chalkboard menu hung low behind the bartender, but even that made no difference. Eyeing the display of Spanish appetizers was the only way to truly know any choices.

  He ordered her chopitos, battered, and tiny squid, aceitunas or olives with anchovies, and sliced jamón ibérico, a smooth, rich-textured ham from the rare black-footed pig that ran one hundred twenty-five dollars for a pound. He did it all knowing she would squeal at the squid, shriek at the anchovies, and sniff the jamón before tasting. Half of him enjoyed introducing her to new things because the reaction was always spectacular. The other half of him just enjoyed it.

  She surprised him that night, nibbling on a quarter pound of jamón, taking seconds on the chopitos, and daring to try the pulpo a la gallega, or octopus in olive oil.

  “It’s not good,” she admitted. “And yet I can’t stop eating it.”

  Kenji plopped a sliver of ham in his mouth and chased it with sangria. “It’s because you’re greedy,” he noted. “Among other things.”

  Her eyes lit at the barb. “Like?” The tease in her voice unmistakable.

  What he’d planned was an insult, a quip that she’d trade, one for another and so forth. But she’d smiled at him, and her hair hung free; loose coffee curls that framed an exquisite face and emphasized full, pink-painted and upturned lips. Kenji sensed that his mouth planned a mutiny.

  Lizzie leaned forward, as if knowing, as if suddenly in tune with the very stirring of his heart. Drawn, he did the same.

  “Say it,” she said.

  “Say what?” he said, the words taking effort.

  Only with reluctance did his gaze lift from her lips. The room shrank, bar to table to Kenji and Lizzie.

  Friends, he thought. They weren’t just friends, and yet, these weren’t just dates. Dinner, wine, mundane conversation, mediocre sex: those were the ingredients of dates. But this, even calling it “different” somehow did it disservice. More than friends and less than more, they balanced in a precarious limbo of trust where she could admit to drug addiction and prostitution, but not to whatever was happening between them. But Kenji fared no better. He, in turn, could readily talk about the gap between his dreams and reality, of abandoning baseball for the residue of his father’s legacy, but dared not breach the chasm between them. Wrong. There was nothing between them, nothing before him but an addict bent on self-destruction. Nothing between them but life’s realities. And yet, there was more; as he couldn’t deny the bitterness he felt when nightfall came and the truth of how she made her living nudged at him, unwilling to give him rest.

  He pushed the thought from his mind.

  Kenji’s gaze fell to the daffodils potted on the counter. He plucked a few, arranged them in her hair, and stood back to survey his work. He had expected the flowers to enhance her, but he’d not expected this—her blushing at up at him, gingerly thumbing the flowers, enhancing them instead of vice versa.

  Lizzie caressed the daffodils of her hair with fingertips. What did a girl do when a man gave her flowers? What did she say? What did it mean?

  Marveling at the effortless way Kenji made her feel both adequate and lacking, both certain and unsure, Lizzie knew herself to be a woman who earned wages by pleasing men, and because of that, found herself ensnared. Kenji didn’t want the obvious, and yet, what he did want was less than obvious. She heated at the thought of what she possibly could give.

  Stupid.

  She was stupid for thinking herself a woman useful for more than a man’s lust; stupid for thinking a man might want her for more; and stupid for believing they could ever be anything but sister and brother-in-law, ever.

  But the feel of his fingers brushing her face in the moment he withdrew from planting flowers in her hair lingered still. She thought nothing more tender than that touch and her lashes fluttered with the memory. He was close enough for her to bask in faint traces of his scent: cool lavender and spice; she pulsed in response. So infrequent was her desire, a real desire for another, that it nearly mystified her. There’d been so many false coins, so many counterfeit transactions that she could hardly stand to desire a man. It didn’t help that she couldn’t understand what the flower in her hair meant, or his touch, or the darkening of his gaze, even. But she turned away nonetheless, fearful he might look at her and understand too much.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lizzie climbed the stairs of her building in slow and indulgent fashion, still fingering the daffodils in her hair. A self-conscious smile crept to her lips, the mark of thorough embarrassment. Who knew the sway an unwavering gaze and a few cheap flowers could have on her! Pulse pounding childishly, she suspected her cheeks were the dull color of salmon. Before Kenji, she hadn’t thought blushing as the prerogative of a whore. But neither were flowers or the company of a single man, night after night. Five evenings he’d claimed from her exclusively; five nights too many, she supposed. And yet she’d grown reckless, unable to stave it. Still smiling, Lizzie noted a petal as it wafted from her hair to the stairs. So reluctant was she to part with the perfection of the evening that she thought to retrieve it and tuck it anywhere in her hair. When Lizzie bent to get it, she rose to the sight of Snow in her doorway.

  “Have a good time?”

  Her mouth worked furiously.

  “Get your stupid ass in here.”

  “I was just out for a walk. I was just—”

  He sledgehammered her with a palm, blasting so that her head slammed into the side wall. She lost her footing and tumbled back—sliding, plummeting backward down concrete stairs.

  A long time ago, Lizzie had thought them equal partners, with Snow sending her clients and content with only keeping a cut. He was a consultant, a protector, a sound voice, and practical friend. But that façade had ended almost as soon as it begun.

  “Get up, you worthless bitch!”

  When her grandmother threw a teenaged Lizzie out, Lizzie fled to Snow, frightened and desperate not to be homeless. He took her in, dolled her up, and splurged for a week on coke. She slept in his bed, cooked for him, pleased him on command, and thought herself his girlfriend, in both name and deed despite the age difference.

  Snow snatched Lizzie by the wad of her mane and heaved her upward, forcing her to scramble so that scalp and hair would not part. He dragged her that way, feet tangling on stairs, hands groping at air, till he heaved her through the front door of her apartment. It was clean.

  “For a week you inconsistent on my streets!” Snow screamed. “For a week I’m looking for my money! Tell me what that cost! Tell me what that cost me!”

  He blasted her in the abdomen, smashed her in the temple, and righted her when she crumpled on the way down. She could find no air, only spots, black spots, widening, closing in from every direction.

  He would kill her. It would be an
accident, she knew, but just the same she would die. Maybe it’d be better that way, to wither at his hands, quick, to finally succumb to the life she’d led. Pain would only be fleeting, then death, and maybe death would be like the high she chased.

  Lizzie’s mouth began to close in on itself.

  A week after the she’d moved in with Snow as a teenager, he began to complain about the money they’d spent. She’d snorted all of it, and she needed to replace it. Lizzie figured they’d do it the old way, the tried way that worked in high school, where he’d direct a few older guys to her bed, guys who were halfway to hard at the thought of a teenager already. But Snow wanted more.

  “On the stroll,” he’d said. “You could make two, three grand a week with a body like yours.”

  On the stroll. She’d been leery of standing on a corner and waiting for a stranger, unwilling to take the final leap to what she thought of as real prostitution. But when she actually said as much, he grew dark.

  “You sit in my house and suck any dick come through that door. You do it for a line of coke, a nickel bag of weed, for a beer sometimes. You already a trash hoe. What’s the difference?”

  She opened her mouth to tell him the difference, to tell him the dangers of the street. But a slap halted her words. A slap halted them back then. A beating halted them now.

  “Answer me, bitch!”

  The bitter metallic of blood filled her mouth. “I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t know.”

  “What a fuck cost, Lizzie?”

  She lowered her gaze. “Seventy-five dollars.”

  “And where you better be if I can’t find you?”

  “With a john.”

  “So, where the fuck’s my money for the last week?”

  She had nothing, of course, but the dollars in her Bible, seventy-two that she’d manage to smuggle.

  He gave her a murderous look. “You got a baller coming around here every day. You must be pocketing my money!”

  “No!”

  “Then you stupid enough to fuck for free! What? You think he gonna wife you?”

  “No, Snow, please. I—”

  He hit her.

  And hit her.

  And hit her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Kenji stared at the buttons of his cell, pissed with how expectantly they stared back at him. He wouldn’t call. He refused to call.

  Three thousand variations on emotion and not a postcard from her. Hadn’t she enjoyed the movies, dinner, the zoo, his one hundred twenty-five dollar jamón ibérico? What kind of woman disappeared anyway, without the slightest inclination that she’d do so?

  Kenji cursed and tossed his phone onto the desk. He watched it clatter and skitter precariously before returning to the view of the bay from his office.

  But as fury settled, he recalled the track marks he pointedly ignored and stories of humiliation she routinely suffered for a few crumpled dollars. Lizzie Hammond could be anywhere—sleeping off a near-lethal dose of cocaine or dumped facedown in a ditch.

  Kenji turned back to his phone. Eyed it as if it were a sneaky enemy.

  Still, he wouldn’t call.

  ~*~

  Lizzie kept ice on her face till night, when she dressed in a pink fishnet mini that sculpted ass and tits, paired it with patent leather pumps, and stepped out, huge hair fanning her face to hide the bruising.

  Her ribs ached, and she could take only shallow breaths, but pain was the least of her worries. Eating away at her core like a double-mouthed monster was her true master, the one she’d tried to ignore. Tonight, however, he would get his due.

  A suffocating night greeted Lizzie, air thick with humidity and smog. She nudged by the drag queen asleep on her stoop and veered right, the start of her stroll. Even in her deteriorated condition, she didn’t have long to wait. In fact, Lizzie rarely ever did. A silver Sentra pulled up alongside her.

  She bent low to peek as the passenger-side window skated down, fingers in her hair and twirling to mask the bruising of her cheek.

  “What you feeling like?” Lizzie said.

  Well-rounded and black, he pressed the edges of the interior as if trying to expand it. Scalp protruded from a mass of uneven and unkempt hair; a few pieces of lint waded in it precariously.

  “Whoa! Who did that to you?” he said and leaned forward for a better view of her face.

  A cold sort of meanness ate her insides, making her want to slash and claw at his thick frame, clear to the promise of bone. Had he known what she felt, what she imagined, he would haul ass outta there. No cocaine, no crack, no heroin. She was empty, restless, nothing.

  “You want to fuck or not?” she blurted.

  The trick recoiled. “Yeah. I . . . I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if you just get in, or, you know . . .”

  He waited for her instruction even as she blinked blankly. Eyes wide, even so as not to betray anything and yet betraying everything, in that moment, he reminded her of Kenji.

  “Fifty dollars,” she said softly.

  He dug into his wallet and handed her the money through the passenger-side window. After stuffing it in her shoe, she jumped in the car.

  “There’s an alley up ahead on the right. Park there,” she instructed.

  He pulled off. They went two blocks before veering off in a lane so narrow a car’s doors could barely open in it. He killed the engine and turned back to her.

  For a guy who’d never had a hooker, he warmed to the idea quick. The moment after removing his keys from the car he reached under Lizzie’s seat and yanked on a handle, zipping her back to the hilt. His door flew open and thudded against the wall of an abandoned tenement before he squeezed out into the alley and dropped his pants. Comically, Lizzie’s john shuffled round the Sentra, legs bound at the ankles by his pants and frosted white despite his darkness. He threw open Lizzie’s door.

  She leaned back, legs open to make room for him and waited for him to pull on a condom. He looked around quickly—why he hadn’t done so before dropping his pants was beyond her—and then climbed in, back brushing the windshield with his stature.

  He ambled atop her, heavy breathing like a wind tunnel in her ear. With two hands he gripped the headrest and heaved. In her, he twitched and pulsed on pause, cock like a fattened and stirring Vienna sausage.

  Lizzie closed her eyes, as the starkness of withdrawal cramped her insides and dried her mouth. A mountain of a man thrust into her, violating her, forging deep and simultaneously repulsing her. Stinking of musk and manhood and perspiration, he heaved and ho’ed and grinded with theatrical laboring, but paused intermittently to whisper appreciation for her body. He was but a gross miscalculation of affection, a falsehood for the girl who’d had flowers in her hair and a kiss on her forehead.

  Lizzie turned away, hiding the tears in her eyes.

  She touched him, a single hand on his hip with the realization that she’d been neglectful, and he moaned uproariously. He took to humping her, hips curling, car bouncing with each hopping stroke. He would go and go and go, pay her, and at the end, there she would find her prize: the high. Already, Lizzie could feel bliss tromping through her veins, stamping out pain, stamping out all. Eyes rolling, she arched her back at the pleasures that waited. He could beat her, bruise her, drill her in the dirt and leave, so long as at the end, happiness waited.

  And yet, even as she craved it, as her stomach knotted for it, Lizzie knew it for the demon it was, for the fury it wreaked and for the death it would bring.

  ~*~

  Lizzie found Deon, the only heroin dealer that side of Overtown, on a stoop playing cards with three black guys. She climbed the old white and slack-looking porch and stood quietly at Deon’s side, waiting for acknowledgment.

  “I need a little H on credit,” she said.

  Though she had some money, it was hardly enough to cover what she already owed him, what she needed, and what she was required to pay Snow.

  Deon frowned at his hand. “Pay me for
the last dope I gave you.”

  A few of the card players snickered. Lizzie recognized the one with dreadlocks as an old friend of her brother’s.

  “I’ll get it. Money’s tight.”

  “Money’s always tight for a crackhead,” Deon said.

  More laughter.

  Lizzie whimpered. She’d tried to cut back, wanted to cut back. But her quiet yearning had become a yawning hunger, and now, fingernails dug into palms in an effort to keep from picking at her flesh. Nervousness swallowed her. She had to have something. God. Please. Help.

  “I’ll do anything,” Lizzie said.

  Deon looked up, bored.

  “Snow’s inside,” he said.

  Fear sliced her, and Lizzie rushed from the porch, heels fumbling on stairs so that she pitched, facedown, to packed dirt. Howls of laughter taunted her, even as she scrambled up and into the night, never daring to look back with the fear of Snow on her heels.

  She tried to get back to work, but by two A.M. Lizzie ached.

  One hundred twenty dollars in her pocket and not an ounce of heroin or gram of crack in sight. Her nose ran, and her stomach snarled, forcing her to double over in the fury of convulsions. She couldn’t walk and would’ve crawled, had she thought that even possible. So, Lizzie balled up, fetal position in the same alley her johns tossed cum-filled condoms. She lay there, nose near a yellowed and cracked needle streaked in blood, and an old Coke can, hollowed out and burnt. Sweat and dirt streaked mud on a still swollen face as her heart pounded an uneven tune of pain and panic alike. Shadows passed her eyes briefly as the world dimmed and pitched. Lizzie’s bowels gave way and finally, blackness overwhelmed her.

  When Lizzie woke in the morning, it was with the shame of lying near enough to feel the spray of a wino’s hot piss as he relieved himself near her face. It was promptly followed by the realization that she’d shit herself.