Bill Cheng - Southern Cross the Dog

Last year on his twenty-first birthday Robert had fetched himself a shave and gone to a movie, a double feature. He shrank into the sticky velvet of his seat. The theater was full of people — dozens of staring eyes, silent as trees. He could feel their heat clouding the air, drawing over him. On the screen a white woman billowed out big and silky in her sun hat. Dust popped and crackled on her cheeks. It’d been eight years already since the fire in Bruce. It was a memory he kept tasting, faint like metal in blood.

He couldn’t sit all the way through the first film. On the sidewalk, the afternoon was bright and hot. There were cinders in his eyes, and he mashed his palms into his sockets.

Around the corner, he found a bar with a COLOREDS WELCOME sign hanging from the door. The trash was piled to the windows, and a cloud of moths danced on the glass. Inside, the bar was empty and a stale smell like wet wool hung in the air. An electric fan was going, moving the dust around. He turned to leave when a man came in through a trapdoor from behind the counter. He was a white man, short and fat with swollen cheeks. His oily hair was parted in the middle. The man smiled and motioned with his smooth, fish-pale arms.

Sit at the counter?

He leaned over and wiped a stool with a rag.

Robert sat down and the seat was smooth with grease.

What can I get you?

I don’t have but fifteen cents.

The man looked him over slowly. How ’bout a sandwich? he asked. On the house.

The sandwich was stale and oversalted. Still he wolfed it down, chewing the hard rough bread. When he swallowed, he tasted blood and tongued the bright sting in his cheek.

New in town?

Robert looked at the man carefully.

It’s just that I never seen you around here before.

I bale cotton on the Jones-Tennessy plantation.

That so?

That’s so.

He turned back to his sandwich. The man rested his hands on his belt and the air shifted inside him. He cleared his throat and busied himself with filling up a glass with a pitcher of water.

What’s your name, son?

Billy, he lied.

Those hands of yours are awful soft-looking for handling baling wire.

Robert stood up and pushed off from the counter.

Thanks for the sandwich, he said.

Now wait a minute. I was just talking.

Robert started for the door, but it opened inward in front of him. It would’ve smashed into him if he hadn’t jumped out of the way. There was a girl on the other side. She looked up at him, startled.

That’s my daughter, the man said from behind him. He was grinning.

Your daughter?

The girl was colored and there were wires in her teeth. Her eyes were big and staring, flecks of gold in the iris. She was smiling up at him.

You can call her Marie, he said.

Is that really your daughter?

Maybe, the man said. Are you interested?

The girl had already started to working. She was looking him up and down, dragging her smooth nail down the front of his shirt.

I haven’t got but fifteen cents, he said. The man didn’t say anything so Robert took her hand in his and said it again. Just fifteen cents.

She don’t hear you. This one is deaf and dumb, the man said.

The girl slipped her hand from his and rested her arms on his shoulders, framing the sides of his neck. Her skin was cool and slippery smooth.

I think she likes you, the man said.

IN THE TINY BACK ROOM, she moved expertly in the dark, first stripping off his belt, then his shirt. She went for the small flannel bag around his neck but he guided her hand away. No, he said. She tried again and he squeezed her fingers. No! He thought maybe she heard him because she didn’t try again. Instead, they fell blindly onto the bed. She worked him through the zipper of his trousers and he wondered if her eyes were better on account of her being deaf. Could she see his face then, the lean and ashen hollow of his cheeks? She was warm at his tip. She slid down, soft, grasping. The breath went out of him. He felt his insides being drawn out. A weak queasy feeling flowed up his stomach, into his throat. The pressure built behind his eyes.

On the ceiling there were stripes of sunlight between the slats from where the afternoon was casting through. There was someone upstairs, their footfalls dislodging fine grains down over the bed. The girl was small and lithe, her body passing through the slashes of light. He leaned back and she shoveled down on him. He felt himself sinking first through the pillows, the sheets, into the mattress, then deeper still, to floor then stone then earth, down and down, into that cold low chamber. He opened his eyes and she was there still, her braces sharp and catching the sun.

When he came, she caught it in her palm and wiped it on his stomach. He didn’t move, exhausted. The blood was thumping in his temples. He heard her moving in the dark, rifling through his clothes. He heard the dull thump of his shoes, the insole lifting, his last twenty dollars melting away.

THE NEXT DAY ON THE train out of town, he got hooked for freight-hopping. The railroad bulls came down with their fists and boots and clubs. He thought he heard his nose break. There was a crunch and his head filled with salt and iron. Not so beautiful, one of them said. His body was a rag doll, tumbling out of the car. The ground was hard and loveless. Behind his eyelids, there was the sun, warm and red. He spat strings of black into the dust. He listened to the bulls gather, the crackle of grit under their soles. They kicked him awhile, burying their toes into his ribs. He kept his eyes shut and tried not to yell. When they’d finished, they carried him into their car and drove.

He felt ashamed about the lie he told, the name he’d given to that girl. He wasn’t sure why he’d done it, why it had been the name to come to him. He told himself it was a coincidence.

A bag went over his head and he could smell his own damp breath blowing back against him. It was sour and foul like something had rotted in his mouth.

The car ride seemed to go forever. The men were talking but he couldn’t make out their words over the thumping of his pulse. His throat had tightened and he gagged on his own fluid. He thought in his confusion that they’d got the noose around him. Then he realized it was just the devil around his neck. He’d been pulling hard on the loop of twine.

When the car stopped, someone lifted him up by his arm and stood him on his feet.

This’ll do.

They pulled the bag from his head. There was so much light, he thought his eyes might crack. His knees started to crumbling.

Please, he said.

Someone said something. A word of warning, maybe. Then a bright warm pain opened in the side of his head and he was gone.

In that deepening black, he dreamed again of the Dog. Not the Widow Percy’s dog he’d seen in Bruce but a large black hound — lean and sleek — that looked out at him with deep piercing eyes from which no light could escape.

When he awoke, the grass was tattooed to his cheek. He sat up. His skull was crowded with pain. In the upper sky he could see the first splatter of starlight descending down. Then in the low violet bands, the sun set behind the western hills. He was in a field, unmarked save for a small creek a few yards down, burbling along the yellowed grasses. How long had he been unconscious? Hours? Days? Years? He touched the side of his head. The blood was still sticky. He pushed against the pain and stood himself up. Then he moved slowly toward the water. Grasshoppers grazed past him, their wings grinding through the air.

He sat down on a rock and listened to the blood click in his septum. The air was starting to cool. The pain eased into a dull humming ache. He leaned out over the water and washed the blood from his face. Then he angled his mouth into the stream and swallowed. It hurt going down but he drank again, sucking the inky cold water, drawing it in. His heart was beating. He was alive. He was still alive. Above him, there was the ancient sky, yoking back the heavens. Still holding. His eyes started to well.