John Hawkes - Second Skin

“You leave Chloris alone,” her partner hissed, and I yanked my hand from her shoulder, blushed at the realization that I had been squeezing her little thin rounded shoulder.

“No harm meant,” I said under my breath. “Just lost my footing. She’s all yours,” and I smiled at the relentless black walnut eyes, wheeled and cut in on Jomo, took Cassandra right out of his arms.

“OK, Jomo,” I said, “I’m cutting in.”

It was the far dark comer of the gym and there was a young marine sitting on top of a pile of wrestlers’ mats, and I noticed his mouthful of bright cigar, his crooked smile in the dark, the glint of the bottle he didn’t even pretend to hide. Three or four younger boys were hanging around the marine and sharing his bottle, waiting for word from Jomo and talking in lewd tones about Cassandra and me. By the way they turned their heads and covered their mouths and jerked their thumbs at us I knew perfectly well that they were talking in lewd tones about us. Country haircuts — except for the shaved marine — and the country ears and country Adam’s apples. Inheritors of the black Atlantic. Boys who talked a lot but never danced. And of course the marine, the pride of the school, the pride of the woman at the piano. Sophomore in uniform. Leather head. Twenty-seven wounds in the rib cage. Telling them how he raped the little Japanese children. Cocking his knee in the darkness, passing the bottle. Promising to show them all twenty-seven scars in the john.

And glancing to the left, to the right, leaning down as close as I could to Cassandra, and fighting all the while against the current and trying to draw away from Jomo’s friends in the corner — but there was no escaping the shadows, the arrogant glow of the cigar — and trying to subdue the electrical field of green taffeta and worrying, apologizing for my graceless steps, “It’s a tough crowd, Cassandra,” I said, “I don’t like the looks of it.”

She was stiff, her back was stiff, her arm was suddenly un-supple, she was making it hard for me. And I wanted to see her face — how could she, why did she turn away from me? — and wanted to feel the taffeta yielding, wanted some sign of her happiness. “You aren’t having fun, Cassandra?” I said, and squeezed her hand, wondered whether I might not be able to imitate the sons of the sea and whirl her around by that little tapering white hand for our amusement, hers and mine, and whirl her so that her skirts would rise. But there was only the varnished floor, only the stiff shadows of ropes and acrobatic rings looping down from the darkness overhead, only the steam pipes along the walls with their enormous plaster casts like broken legs, and it was discouraging and I wanted to take her to the cloakroom and take her home. “Refreshments, Cassandra? How about some chocolate cake?” And seeing a movement in the vicinity of the indolent marine and talking closer to her ear, more quickly, “Or Coke, Cassandra? Join me in a little toast to Sonny?”

But one of his admirers had taken the marine’s peaked cap, had hung it on the side of his head and was sauntering in our direction, swaggering. The cap was flopping against his neck, the pubic hair was curling around his ears, he was whistling— despite the clarion cornet and choking accordion — and he was advancing toward us casually, deliberately, shuffling our way from the darkness of giggling drinkers and lolling marine. Then a punch on my arm, jab in my ribs, and a boy’s brogan landed in a short swift kick just above my ankle and Bub was saying, “Come on, Sister, let’s dance,” and threw his arms around her and hopped from side to side, snorting and snuffling happily into the green. Proud of his rhythm. Proud of the hat. Bub acting on orders. Bub determined to work his hands under the green bow. And Cassandra? Cassandra’s eyes were closed and she was resting her palms lightly on the heavy wooden humps of his boyish shoulders. As I started away I saw them converging on her — Jomo, Red — saw the menacing horizontal thrust of the baseball cap, the bright arc of the swinging hook, the enormous black figure of Captain Red with his tie pulled loose. They began cutting in on each other, spitting on their hands or giving her up without a word, standing by and serving as outriders for each other, and at once I understood that they were taking turns with her and that this then was their plan, their dark design.

“Me?” I said. “Someone wants me? Outside?”

She grinned, a tiny girl, messenger with bobbed hair, and said she would show me the way. Mystery. Trap set by the marine? Cruel joke? But I decided that Miranda must be having asthma out in the snow and that my little girl guide — spit curls, washed and fed, eyes like a little mother cat, and plump, liberal with her own lipstick, well-mannered and ready for the juice of life — must surely be the daughter of the frenzied sexton who was so dead set on hanging himself from the bell ropes of the Lutheran church. So I followed her.

“Like the dance?”

“Why, yes,” I said, startled, trying to keep up with her, to keep in close behind her, “yes, I do. It gives me an idea of what my own high school reunion might be like,” and I was using the back of my hand, then my handkerchief, trying to catch the scent of her.

“I bet you were popular,” she said. She was not giggling, spoke with no discernible mockery in her voice, this child of chewing gum kisses and plump young body sweetly dusted with baby talc, “I bet you’d have fun with the kids in your school or with your classmates even after thirty or forty years or whatever it is. You don’t look like a kill-joy to me.” And leading me into a cold dark corridor, concrete, bare lead, whistling with the cold wind of my own distant past: “You know what?” speaking clearly, matter-of-factly, while I joined her hastily at the dead weight of a metal fire door and the snow began driving suddenly through a narrow crack and into our faces, “I bet all the girls go for you. Am I right? Aren’t you the type all the girls go after?”

“Well, Bubbles,” I said, and like Carmen’s her black hair was curled into little flat black points, “you’re the second person to mention this idea tonight. So perhaps there’s something in what you say.”

“I knew it,” she said, and we were pushing together, forcing the wrinkling door to yield, small plump girl and tall fat man straining together, beating back the snow, smelling the cold black night of the silent parking lot and breathing together, testing the snow together, “I knew you were the shy unscrupulous type. The type of man who might get a girl in trouble. A real lover.”

“No, no, Bubbles, not in trouble. …” But I was shivering, smiling, setting straight the core of my boundless heart. A real lover. I believed her, and I lifted my broad white face into the wet tingling island snow. We had been able to open the door about a foot and so stood together hand in hand just outside the building. Together, the two of us. Blood under the skin and alone with Bubbles, scot free again.

A pale lemon-colored light from the gymnasium windows lay in three wavering rectangles on the snow. Pale institutional light coming down from the high school wall. And beyond the cold wall, beyond the tenuous light stretched the parking lot with its furry white humps of buried automobiles and, at the far edge, the black trees tangled like barbed wire. Behind the trees was the cemetery, and I could just make out the crumbling white shapes of the tombstones, the markers of dead children, the little white obelisks in the island snow. It was the place of rendezvous for the senior class, of passion amongst the fungus and the marble vines, of fingernail polish on the lips of the cherubim. So I felt that Bubbles and I were alone in some cheap version of limbo, and I chuckled, warmed the fingers of my free hand, and loved the trees, the perfect star-flashes of the snow, the nearness of the little cold cemetery, the buried cars, and at my side the small wet girl. But where, I wondered, was the heavy wolfish shadow of Miranda? Where the shadow of the woman who should have been clutching her chest and wheezing out there in the middle of that field of enchanted snow?