The Cage Keeper and Other Stories Page 6

  When the EMTs strapped him into the gurney I opened my left eye, sticky burn or not, and looked down at his face. His eyes were closed and his cheeks were the color of oatmeal. There was a big spot of blood coming through the sheet near his neck, and even his eyebrows looked a little less bushy, but I knew he wasn’t slipping away; he was simply being silent. Like when he sleeps, and cries. He was lying low when vulnerable, not about to let another creature hear him then get him in the night.

  I get out of my car and close the door. I start to lock it but then stop when I remember the popped lock on the passenger’s side. I walk around the center just in time to see the streetlamp go off on the corner of Tenth Avenue. The dawn sky is vast and gray and what little light there is looks like it might be coming more from the snow on the ground. I walk to the side door and unclip my keys, look through the glass down at the mess hall that is partly lighted from the kitchen. I can barely see the Christmas tree in the corner. I find the right key, work it in the lock, and pull the door open. But the handle is metal, and sticks to my fingers like the bottom of an ice cube tray.

  DUCKLING GIRL

  In a Salvation Army box in El Cerrito Lorilee Waters dreams her face and head are huge, but they keep growing and growing and are getting so big now that they hurt; she opens her eyes fast like somebody just called her name and when she sees rust streaks on the dark green sheet metal above her, a ray of daylight coming in at the wall near her head, she knows right away where she is and so touches her face, pushes lightly on the puffy part where the bones underneath feel like they are being stung by a bee.

  “You dumb ugly bitch. You ugly fucking whore,” he had kept saying, nothing else, and it had lasted so much longer than the other times, and he never let go. In the dark Lorilee can see the thin white threads of a spider’s web in the corner, then his face, red and more bloated than normal, his eyes all shiny and mean-looking. But Papa was drinking, she thinks, her skin and eyes remembering his fist gripping the hair at the side of her head, jerking on it while he yelled about things Lorilee didn’t understand or even hear when the hot light flashed through her head. Then he kicked her shins and she’d bent her knees to the kitchen floor, had smelled the beer on his favorite shirt that was stretched tight over his big belly. She had said, “Okay, you can stop now, okay,” before she had let go of his fist then unzipped his pants, reached in and grabbed that thing that she knew would soon empty itself inside her, would make him loosen his grip on her hair. But then he bent her over the TV and was pushing into the wrong place, cutting into her with his fatty hardness.

  Lorilee hears the steel choke and mesh of something big coasting to change gears outside. She pulls the damp-smelling wool coat off of her then licks a sweat drop from her upper lip. He had been asleep when she slowly, so slowly, slid out from under his heavy arm, got off the couch, then walked naked into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. Then she was dressed, and just before she crept through the kitchen then out the door into the night, she had looked down at his sleeping bulk on the couch, had seen in the TV’s flickering blue light the peace in his face, in his closed eyes and slightly opened snoring mouth. And she had felt nothing but that hot stomach-turning hate for the power she knew she would always have but lately could not control.

  See. Something bad happens, Lorilee thinks as she crawls over the huge pile of clothes away from the smell of pennies and wet sneakers toward the light. Something always happens. She slides back the metal door then climbs out of the steel box into the brightness of the day, blinking at it. She tastes her spit and wishes for a toothbrush then pulls her long stringy blond hair back out of her face and tucks it behind her ears. And with a sore ache living now in the exact center of her body she walks down San Pablo Street, walks with the sun hot on her head, a queasiness growing in her stomach.

  FREEZE LOOKS AT THE plum-purple bruise on Lorilee’s cheek, blue-black around the edges. “Check it out. Who you been playing with?”

  “Nobody.” She moves over the front seat and sits beside him. “My dad was mad ’cause I forgot to make his lunch.”

  “Can’t fuck with a man’s stomach,” Barry says. He gets in beside her and pulls the door shut, looks down at her big breasts pushing against the white material of her shirt. When Freeze pulls back onto San Pablo Barry takes another sip from his bottle of Mateus.

  Freeze drives fast through El Cerrito into Richmond and all the windows are down but the inside of the car is so hot Lorilee smells the old vinyl of the seats, the rust of the ceiling under its tattered covering, a hanging flap of it rippling back against itself. They pass the small shops and pool halls along San Pablo, some with windows held together with dusty gray plumber’s tape, this one-story row of wood and cinder-block buildings looking as settled in their shabbiness as the old men who sit in the shadows of the stoops.

  “We’re going up to the quarry,” Barry says to Lorilee. “The beach is too friggin’ hot and crowded.” He takes the bottle from her and wipes it before drinking. When he hands it over to Freeze his arm pushes against Lorilee’s breasts. Her cheeks flush, and when they do, pain breathes heavy under her eye. She reaches up to tilt the mirror down but then Freeze’s hand slaps hers away.

  “Do you guys have any aspirin I could take?”

  Barry is tapping his fingers hard on the dashboard in time to the Tom Petty tape Freeze has been playing all morning. He looks at Lorilee looking back at him then shakes his head in time to the beat, looks straight ahead again.

  “Here.” Freeze takes another sip then wedges the bottle down between Lorilee’s closed legs. It feels cool and damp there and Lorilee waits a second or two before picking it up. Freeze pulls the car up over the gravel and parks it under the jackknife-scarred branches of the old tree. They overlook the pit of the quarry.

  “All right. Nobody’s here,” Barry says as they get out of the car. Freeze keeps the music going and walks around to the front, sits on the hood in the shade. He looks out over the muddy water that is almost green in the midday sun, and lights a cigarette. “How’s Glenn?”

  “What?” Lorilee turns away from Barry, stripped to his skivvies, toe-stepping over the gravel down the slope to the water. She sits on the hood beside Freeze.

  “What did you say?”

  “How’s your brother Glennie doing?”

  Lorilee shrugs her shoulders. “Who knows? Do you have an extra cigarette, Freeze?”

  He offers her his pack, watches her take one then put it to her lips. He hands her his cigarette and she lights hers with it. They both hear Barry’s flabby body make a big splash.

  “I think he’s on a ship. He sent a postcard with a picture of a big ship on it.”

  Lorilee takes a deep drag off her cigarette, remembers the slow sway of her brother’s chain bracelet over the green felt, the crack of the break, the balls rolling out in every direction on the table, then the thunk of one falling into a corner pocket. He had looked up at her with his fist-swollen lips. “The marines, man. Fuck him. I don’t have to eat his shit anymore.”

  Freeze looks at Lorilee’s face. “Get the bottle out of the car, will ya?”

  “Okay.”

  Freeze sees Barry’s whiteness splashing in the water below.

  “Come on in, man. Nothin’ like it.”

  “Later.”

  Lorilee leans into the music to pick the bottle up off the front seat and when she straightens brown fills her eyes; she half sits, half drops to the seat, breathes deeply through her nose, and looks straight ahead at the gravel, at bits of broken glass that glitter there in the sun.

  “Where’s the wine?”

  Lorilee stands back up and walks around the open door to the front of the car and Freeze. She hands him the bottle, picks her burning cigarette up off the hood, and leans against the grille. It hurts the most when she sits, a pain she has only known once before when her bowels were heavy but she had to wait for her father to come out of the bathroom first, when it seemed that hours passed before she heard the t
oilet flush and saw the door open. It had felt like a steel chain being pulled from her insides and there was blood and she had to lie down after.

  Freeze nudges her arm with the bottle, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Lorilee looks at it; she wants a Coke and a sandwich, maybe two. She takes the bottle and sips from it.

  “How’s your face?”

  “I have a headache.”

  “Your old man’s a fucking asshole, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So move.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?” Freeze slides off the hood.

  “I never worked before.”

  “You can work at a fuckin’ hamburger place.”

  “I can’t do the applications, Freeze.”

  “Jesus.” Freeze picks up a handful of gravel, weighs it in his hand, then throws all of it under the branches of the tree and out over the pit at Barry swimming on his back; they rip into the water around him like shrapnel.

  “Hey!”

  “Air attack, General. What can I say?”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  Lorilee sees Barry treading water, his shaved head glistening under the sun looking as black-nubbed and pink-white as a puppy’s belly.

  “You could’ve put an eye out.”

  “Then you’d really look like a killer.”

  Freeze turns to Lorilee, his face looking younger to her; she looks between the opening of his sleeveless denim jacket, sees the smooth skin of his chest, the neat divided sections of his stomach muscles.

  “He’s an asshole,” Freeze says. He looks straight into her eyes then down at her mouth. “Everybody’s an asshole.”

  “Not everybody.” Lorilee flicks her cigarette away then feels it, the sudden flesh awareness of all the openings of her body where shadows have formed and now lie and wait, her tissues preparing themselves without her permission, and she knows that when her eyes meet his she will end up saying and doing whatever he wants. Freeze picks up more gravel then paces with it, looking to Lorilee like somebody with something stolen in his hand and no place to hide it. She looks at the way he can’t seem to stop moving, thinks, Something’s wrong with you, Freeze Benito.

  He drops one pebble at a time from his closed fist then drops all of it, steps toward her. He looks from her mouth to her blue eyes then takes her hand and presses it down between his legs. “Let’s go behind the rock.”

  With her eyes closed against the sun her head aches less but she is sweating very much and it is beginning to burn the swollen side of her face. “C’mon, Freeze, c’mon.” She reaches down and pulls on his cheeks. “C’mon, baby.” She is beginning to chafe. She smells the coconut oil Freeze puts in his hair to slick it back, then feels cool drops of water land on her forehead and closed eyes.

  “What about me?”

  Lorilee opens her eyes to Barry’s white hairless belly, his upside-down smiling face.

  “Get the fuck outta here, man. I’m almost done.”

  Lorilee closes her eyes again and Freeze moves faster, pushes harder then stops, pushes once more then stops again, relaxes his weight on her. She scratches the back of his neck with her fingers. “Did you like it?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She moves her mouth to his cheek but he sees her and pulls out fast, is up zipping and snapping his pants, stepping over her.

  “Go for it,” Freeze says.

  Lorilee blocks the sun from her eyes with her hand, sees Barry still in his underpants holding the bottle of wine. His round face looks at hers then he glances between her legs, places the bottle on the rock, and pulls down his underwear.

  Lorilee sits up.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I have to wait.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do.”

  “You want some wine?”

  “No.”

  “Well then fuckin’ blow me or somethin’.”

  Lorilee looks up past the dark hair and rising penis to his face.

  “Come on.” Barry pulls her head to his middle and with shadows wavering over her tongue and behind her teeth, Lorilee closes her eyes to make them leave, opens her mouth to Barry’s ugliness, her head falling into a rhythm that pulses now through her hollow stomach, behind her closed and aching eyes. He pushes rough and deep. She works harder but they are not leaving, inner pockets of heat that can’t be rubbed away, and their voices have come too; Freeze’s and Barry’s and Papa’s and now Glennie’s, who touched her mouth with his fingers once and said, “Don’t smile when you’re not happy, Lore. It don’t help nothing.”

  Barry grunts and she grips the tremble in his legs then finishes it, opens her eyes again to the light, to Barry backing up, hopping one-footed into his wet underpants over the gravel and parched grass.

  At the car, Lorilee opens the front door at the passenger side.

  “In the back,” Freeze says.

  “I’m sorry.” In the backseat Lorilee is sweating and when Freeze rewinds the tape then turns it up her head aches more than ever. “Freeze?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think maybe we could get some food?”

  Barry gets in the car and looks over his shoulder at Lorilee. “You have money?”

  “No.”

  “Well then.”

  Freeze laughs and then Barry does too, shaking his shaved head back and forth. He bends over to tie his sneakers as Freeze backs the car up fast over gravel. When he gets it turned around, Lorilee looks out the window down at the sun on the water in the quarry, wishes she had at least waded in and splashed the good part of her face.

  Freeze drives fast into El Cerrito. They stop at Kentucky Fried Chicken then are driving again, Barry handing the coleslaw back to Lorilee, she passing the plastic containers of gravy and mashed potatoes up to him.

  “Have some chicken, paisan,” Barry says to Freeze.

  “Don’t want it.”

  Barry tosses a roll into Freeze’s lap. “Here.”

  Freeze picks it up and drops it out the window. “Junk.” He looks in the rearview mirror at Lorilee. She is chewing carefully, the wind blowing her thin blond hair out of her bruised face. “I wouldn’t eat after her if you paid me.”

  Lorilee stops chewing; she looks at the back of Freeze’s head then swallows and looks back out the window.

  “Whatever,” Barry says. He reaches into the grease-spotted cardboard box for another piece of chicken.

  Freeze takes them up a hill where there are large brown and yellow painted houses with wide yards of shaded green grass, the trees tall enough to shade the houses too. Lorilee looks through the back window and can see the bay out there below them: white clouds have covered the bridge and moved in on the city. She sees the tops of buildings sticking out of the fog catching the sun in their tiny square windows. Then they’re in darkness passing through a tunnel made of heavy square bricks covered with orange and green painted words Lorilee can’t understand. They come out again into the day and Freeze slows down as they move into Berkeley.

  “I don’t get it, Freeze,” Barry says. “Why’d your mother send you a hundred bucks?”

  “How the fuck do I know?”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, all right? Jesus.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the bitch is feeling guilty.” Freeze looks over at Barry. “Let’s go blow it.”

  “Now you’re talkin’, bud.” Barry opens his mouth long for a bullhorn of a burp.

  Freeze turns right onto Telegraph. The street is narrow but the sidewalks are wide, shaded by trees that look to Lorilee like they were built there just like all the different shops with windows full of clothes and stereos and hanging green plants. She looks out at two women on the sidewalk sitting on a jewelry-covered blue blanket under a tree. One has long braided hair that hangs down in front of her and they are both barefoot, the bottoms of their feet black with dirt.

  She leans her head back against the seat and tries to ignore the electric scream and th
ump of the music coming from each side of her head. People are looking at them as they drive by and Lorilee wishes Freeze would turn it down. She can’t remember ever coming here before, to this place full of so many different-looking kinds of people, and so she watches them, sees in the darkened doorway of a building a blind man picking the strings of his metal guitar, his eyes hidden behind glasses covered with grimy masking tape, his brown cheeks sucking in past the bones of his face. She looks away to the other side of the street where two bald men wearing long orange robes are singing and swaying, one of them shaking and tapping a tambourine.