T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

“Where’s the bar?”

“Sorry, back to work.” She apologized again for Margaret, making Achilles wonder if he had missed something important, if Ines was slumming, or if he had just blown a blind date. It wasn’t the first time someone had hooked him up with a woman on the basis of race alone. Should he have asked for her number?

“I can help with the work.”

She studied his face. “You really took a beating, huh? Okay. Only one. And only because you’ve been so helpful. And only because it was just Veteran’s Day. Yesterday.”

Achilles shrugged. Veteran’s Day was for old people, but if was worth a drink, so be it.

She chose a tourist trap atop Jax Brewery, a restaurant decorated with paintings of housekeepers in mammy head wraps, life-sized inflatable alligators wearing wrap-around mirrored glasses, and a waiter who introduced himself as “Samuel Clemens, your captain on this here steamboat.” The appetizers were priced as entrees, the coffee as cocktails. At least they had a corner booth with a good view. The blinking Jax sign he had only seen from a distance with Wages now hovered overhead like a halo. One window offered a view of the streets below, and the other the river, black and shiny like wet obsidian, the waves looking sharp and still.

He hadn’t felt this excited about Janice; maybe she had been too easy. On their first date they ate fried rice in the food court and snuck into Terminator 2. The week before, they’d kissed under the bleachers, and the night before screwed at the Ass Station, the abandoned gas station out on the old county road. Maybe it was because Ines was worldlier. Before ordering her coffee, she confirmed that she liked the brand they used, and requested special milk and Baileys on the side, and not that well substitute, Carolans. Janice was happier than a frog in a swamp whenever a diner had little white thimbles of cream and, after each meal, stuffed a handful into her purse. Janice had flags and pandas and fireworks painted on her long nails. Ines had natural nails with a strip of white across the tips, simple and glamorous at the same time.

She leaned forward, her breasts momentarily resting on the table, heavy, real snake charmers. A Spiderman pendant lounged in her cleavage. Lucky devil! God, she was so beautiful. Chivalry had its perks. After opening the door to the stairway, he’d remained two paces behind her to ensure a better view. What could be more pleasurable than watching a fine woman walk uphill, a little bit of shake in every step? Maybe Merriweather was right about the steroids in chicken giving white girls big asses. A thick cotton T-shirt, faded denim jeans, dreadlocks, freckles, a head wrap — the classic rich hippy, the prototypical freaky white girl, except her clothes fit like she’d been poured into them. Ines: white woman with a black woman’s ass. As Merriweather would have said, she had puddin’ in her pop, enough Jell-O to make Bill Cosby blush.

“Guys don’t take their friends here.” She gestured toward the windows. “Views are considered romantic.” He had passed the first test, so he kept quiet about how much guys appreciated a view if it provided a clear shot.

“No, Wages doesn’t take me to any fancy joints.”

She smiled. “You even go by last names on the outside?”

“Outside? You make it sound like prison.”

“It is if you’re a woman, and can’t even go to funerals. American women are like a third sex. We have a little more freedom, but it’s still demeaning. Did you know that one in seven Afghan women—”

“Die in childbirth.” Achilles finished her sentence, adding that he’d once been posted to Rabia Balkhi, the renovated women’s hospital, after hardliners tried to disrupt the construction.

She nodded, then continued anyway, explaining that Afghan women had to buy their own medical supplies — sutures, drugs, everything — before surgery. “I spent a year as a gender advisor with an NGO.”

Achilles said nothing, even though he knew how the system worked over there, and that men had to buy their own shit too. Achilles decided not to ask what a gender advisor did. He pointed at her pendant. “You like Spiderman?”

“A gift from my cousin Sammy. His favorite superpower is webcasting. I told him he could learn that in school these days, but he didn’t get it.”

Achilles offered a half grin. “I don’t know much about technology.”

She asked, “What’s your favorite superpower?”

“America.”

“Hmmph! Mine is invisibility.”

“That’s not a superpower. I learned that in the army.”

“Is that why you joined, to get superpowers?” she asked.

“Is that why you volunteered?” asked Achilles.

“No. I wanted to be like all the other kids in my school. If I’d been a man, I’d have been that soldier who carried me out of the minefield.” She winked at him. “Selfless, like in the movies where you’re leaning over a terribly wounded soldier, gripping his bloody hand, and he says, ‘Go on without me, save yourself.’”

It wasn’t like that at all. Most guys begged for help. Their biggest fear, once assured they would survive, was being left behind. Remembering Jackson’s face, Achilles reached for the cigarette he usually carried behind his ear. He smoked less than two a week, but kept one on hand to stave off tears.

“He put your life at risk.”

“He could see my footprints. He had a metal detector.”

“It’s just dangerous.”

“That surprise you?” Ines was beaming, eyes bright and perky as she told him about her soldier’s name, unit, and uniform. “He touched his hat — just like in a Western — and said, ‘eleven-bang-bang at your service, ma’am.’” The chances were slim, but did Achilles recognize him?

He didn’t, and wouldn’t have admitted otherwise. He hadn’t come this far all for her to applaud another Troy, whom he could easily imagine tipping his pot top like a magician. Were this a movie, Achilles would walk out. He disliked films anyway, especially porn, preferring doing to watching. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window and his stomach turned. His eyes were still bloodshot, chin scabbing over, face abraded. What was he thinking? That was probably why the old white couple sitting nearby kept looking at them.

Achilles’s father used to tell him that lots of women would like him, Lots and lots of women, he always said with a wink. But Achilles hadn’t been lucky that way. No one as hot as Ines signed his yearbook. He wasn’t as bold as Troy or as smooth as Merriweather.

Ines’s coffee and Achilles’s tequila arrived. She moved with precision, holding her teaspoon above her cup and pouring sugar into it until it overflowed, counting to three before dumping the teaspoon into the cup. The coffee on the saucer she poured back into the cup. She licked her spoon and set it squarely on a napkin, then bent forward, her breasts kissing, to nose the cup, inhaling deeply before taking a sip. A pale peach quarter moon remained on the rim of the cup. Did it taste chalky? Sweet? Like those wax lips, one bite and your mouth was flooded with sugar?

Entranced by these ruminations, he lost track of the conversation for a moment, but his wavering attention refocused when she said, again without a hint of jest or irony, “You know how most white people are.”

“Yeah, I know how they get.” Achilles smiled, sitting up, sticking out his chest, flexing his arms.

She smiled back.

Soon enough she was talking about demographics, and how it should be illegal for recruiters to target inner cities where it was impossible for black kids to turn down the temptation of recruitment bonuses that exceeded their annual minimum wage, Mickey D’s salary. That’s what surprised Achilles about most white people: they constantly bitched about the world, even shit that didn’t concern them. He let her talk without interruption, camouflaged in her awe, preferring her take on the war, her sense of the heroic and, as she put it, “tragic role of the soldier who needs a job, but not as a hit man. Right?”