T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

“Does this mean you’re not coming home?”

Ines walked to the window. “I’ve thought about this for a long time. You know I care about you—”

“But not enough to come home?”

“That’s not it.”

“Not enough to be with me. Not enough to want to be with me. You mean you care about me as a friend? Like a charity case? Or the way you care about Mabel and Bud. Is that it?” He stood and pounded his fist for emphasis as he said each name. “You care about me the way you care about the Harpers or Dudley.”

“That’s mean, Achilles. That’s not right,” said Ines, her hands on her hips.

“That’s how it sounds to me.”

“I mean about Dudley. You know Dudley’s dead.”

Achilles sat back down, shaking his head. “Mabel said … Fuck. I don’t know what the fuck is going on here. She said he was at home. If she won’t tell the truth, I’m not responsible.”

“That’s it, Achilles,” said Ines, pointing, her finger trembling before leveling out like a divining rod pointed straight at his heart. “That’s it. The anger. The violence. You need to see somebody. You’re in a space where you attract trouble if you’re left on your own. Like the mugging in Atlanta.”

“That’s my fault?”

“People attract what they deserve. No. I mean we attract what we … deserve. Yes. Anger, hate, love. We get back what we give, nothing more and nothing less.”

“I haven’t given you anything. So you won’t come home?”

“That’s not it. You’re carrying stuff with you that you obviously don’t want to tell me about, and I understand that. But you have to tell somebody. You have to face whatever is eating at you so you can be here .” She put her hand on her chest, “Present in your own heart, in your own life. You can’t be a community of one.”

He’d had a response prepared, but she said “community” as Wages had said “community,” as Levreau had said “community,” and he forgot what he wanted to say. “I have a community. I’m a soldier.”

“Isn’t there more than one way to be a soldier, Achilles? More than one way to be brave? Isn’t facing yourself the best way to be brave? Getting back to your community. Maybe you need time to think. Maybe it would be good for you to be with Charlie 1, to be with other soldiers.” She touched the card in his hand. Her fingers were sticky with the juice she’d been handing out, and she smelled like cookies and soap and deodorant.

He tore up the card and intertwined his fingers together tightly, so tightly his nails turned pink. Remember to breathe. Did this mean they were breaking up? Him without her. Her with someone else. Both ideas horrified him. Merriweather once said, “I don’t hit women. That’s not power. Besides, that’s what a lot of them want. That’s how their daddies showed they cared, or didn’t. Some of them will try to make you angry enough to hit them. They’ll talk shit about you, about men in general, about your dick, whatever. I don’t fall for it.” Achilles had blown that off, never believing a woman might want to be hit, or understanding why a man would hit a woman. But he thought he understood now, and Merriweather was wrong. There was power in force. He could grab Ines and take her out of this house, make her go.

That’s all it took.

One quick smack to shock her, but only on the butt, not the face. The face reddens on its own, the smile — she loves that he loves her ass — becoming a look of confusion as the sting traveling from her ass to her brain gains in intensity and she realizes it’s not a love tap. Get your fat ass downstairs, break a right on Tchoupitoulas Street, and don’t fucking stop stepping until you reach the condo, he demands, his hand clutching her jaw so tightly that when he releases her face it takes moment for the blood to return. Hup! Hup! Hup! He barks like a drill sergeant as she fumbles with her bag. Leave it! You can come back for that shit. He ushers her out the door into the stairwell. Hup! Hup! Hup! He chops the air, his hands flashing like tracers. Go! Go! Go! He stomps. Flustered, fluttering, her hands at her neck and then at her sides, no time to think with everything happening so fast, no time even to cry, breathing heavy, her eyes wide and crotch growing wet. Like a buck pushed to charge a stronghold, unable to make sense of the calm voice in his earpiece amid the confusion of the flares and mortars and charges and rockets and grenades and gunfire and random screams, unable to distinguish north from south or friend from foe or up from down until he trips, winding himself, eating a mouthful of dirt on that next ragged inhale; like a newbie belly-crawling to cover when he feels something wet kiss his face as his friend is shot three feet away (their gazes locked in that moment when there is nowhere to hide from the fact that there is nothing to do about it); like a boy in the morgue realizing how much his brother and father resembled each other in death; wanting only for the terror to end, Ines is out the door and down the street before she even realizes what the fuck is going on, and if you ask her tomorrow what happened, she won’t actually be able to tell you, the images again clouding her vision, the memory filling her body with adrenaline and her mind with confusion as surely as if it were happening again — if, and only if, he is that kind of person.

Wages did it and Bethany didn’t go anywhere. But did she jump when a pot fell or a plate broke? Did she stay only because of the baby? Did she walk on a tightrope, thinking, If I fuck up, Kyle will kill me? Hadn’t Achilles been more desperate to please his father after the night Troy first came into their house? Hadn’t his mother hidden Bibles and crosses for decades? Achilles could be on Ines before she knew what had happened. Wages had said, “A woman will always forgive you,” right? “Shoot her in the ass with the cat pistol.” He had come for her and would leave with the prize, right? There were always the stories of guys killing their girlfriends and themselves, of preferring obliteration to isolation. He sympathized with them. They refused to concede what they had worked so hard to earn. They refused to surrender the battle of wills. They understood that you could never regain lost respect, that psychological war was not like a ground war, that you could not regain lost ground except through virtual annihilation, and I won’t let it come to that, Wages had said. But he had. He had. Even the psychological war required occupation — wasn’t that the lesson?

Ines was looking alternately at the floor then at him. She turned to look out the window when she heard children laughing. Her hair was tied hastily behind her head and tucked into her shirt, as it had been when they met, as it often was when she was working.

“I’m going home,” he whispered.

She turned to face him. “I wasn’t ignoring you. I just heard children laughing so hard, I had to look.”

He stood beside her in the window as the wind combed water over a crest in the asphalt like a submarine rising. Achilles would have told her not to apologize for turning her back on him, that in fact he wanted to thank her for it, but for that to make sense, he felt he would have had to explain everything that had just gone through his head, and no one would understand that sudden confluence of vulnerabilities, the room of mirrors that became an emotional kaleidoscope, where for a moment everyone he knew seemed to merge into one person. She could turn her back on him as often as she pleased. He reached for her hand, and she let him take it.

Many streets were passable only by boat, except in the French Quarter and Uptown. People, mostly black and brown, remained stranded on rooftops and highways. The marooned city pumps sat surrounded by still water. Traffic signals and streetlights were inoperable, most homes uninhabitable. Wages’s house and the burned-out camelback were underwater, St. Augustine half submerged. Bodies, again mostly black and brown, floated down the street, their skin stretched to bursting. Merciless heat, abandoned buildings, sporadic gunfire. In this disaster zone racked by utter confusion, this Injun Country, Achilles felt right at home.