Marian Palaia - Given World

I say, “Stay out of Vietnam.” Sixteen degrees north of the equator but still scorching, from what Mick’s letters said.

She says, “I know.”

When she sits up, it will be to smoke a cigarette and work on a drawing of a forest, in deep green, brown, and black, with a few white smudges standing in as rabbits. She will say this forest is in the kingdom of Bengal, though it no longer exists as a kingdom. When I tell her that, she will show me one of her maps, of which she has many, some of them very old. She collects dog-eared… things.

“Oh yes it does, Cookie. It’s right there.” She’ll flick that map with her index finger, a sharp, snapping sound. “See?”

It is hard to argue when it is in black and white like that. Black and white, red and blue. She claims, when she is not drawing or painting, to be a geographer. When she is not drawing or painting, dope sick or high, or trying to figure out how to get high. She’s never actually been anywhere, except here and southern Indiana, the long black-tar highway in between. She left when she got old enough to fight off the inbred uncles, steal a car. I came later, from the north, and at first she was jealous of my wholesome, perfect family. Of how I led my personal Lewis and Clark expedition to the edge of the continent, obliviously determined to beat the crappy odds and discover the Pacific on my own.

There was an intersection of sorts. A convergence. Or maybe an eclipse. And now it is nighttime. We fall asleep on the floor under the creaky ceiling fan. Even sheets weigh too much. The air trying to come through the windows smells like wild animals. Random gunfire in the distance wakes us up. Gang wars. Little boys with Uzis. Lu growls, but softly.

“You want to bring the outside in, but you can’t,” I say. “Not even you.”

“We could take out a wall.”

“What about winter?”

“What about it?” What she means by that, I know, is that winter is not certain, if nothing is. Besides which, these walls, not a one of them belongs to us.

On the subject of fire, she continues to deny ever having set one in the bar. The burned spot in the faded linoleum, burned and melted through to the wood underneath, was someone else’s handiwork. She doesn’t say whose, but I bet she was there. That happened a long time ago, maybe ten years, way before me.

“I hate that Andy keeps telling that story,” she says. I have not mentioned the fire, but she has reminded herself, and I know exactly what she’s talking about. It’s a sore point with her, being falsely accused. Andy is the swamper at the bar, queer as Liberace but not quite as glamorous, a long-haul regular and witness to years of bad behavior in what he calls the Lesbyterian Church. He tracks all of us, me included now, and although nelly and sweet and generous, he is a terrible gossip and not above making things up. I don’t know why the fire story bugs Lu so much; maybe because she has never lied about all the stupid things she actually has done, as she generally doesn’t give a rat’s ass what people say or think.

When I first saw her, she was loudly berating a blind girl from her usual location, leant James Dean — style against the wall by the jukebox, cigarette perched on her lip, smoke narrowing her possum-brown eyes. She pointed at me and demanded to know what year it was. I thought maybe it was some kind of a test, but I didn’t know if there was a trick to passing it, so I just said. She did a little math, turned back to the girl. “I’m thirty-four years old,” she announced, poking a finger into her own chest. “Look at me.” To a blind girl. I was behind the bar, still new and not a little nervous, and everyone else who was in there at the time was appalled, or acting like it. I thought it was funny. I knew that girl. She was a pain in the ass. Got drunk every afternoon and tripped over the dog. Poor animal had a haunted look, bruised fur. I had to draw the line at rustling a blind girl’s dog, but, boy, was I tempted. Lu would have done it, I bet, if she’d thought of it and had someplace to keep it, but she was on the street more often than she was off. Or camping in someone else’s living room.

She came back over and over to flirt with me, but could never get my name right.

“Rachel.”

“Not even close.”

“Bailey.”

“Bailey is a dog’s name.”

She demanded a nickname. I had lots of those.

“My brother used to call me Cupcake,” I said, and she promptly forgot that too.

“Cookie,” she said, five minutes later. In a way, she invented me. I could not have invented her, as I did not have the experience or the capacity. When I got to know her, the bit that she let me, sometimes I called her Loopy, sometimes Sloopy. Sometimes she answered. She and Mick would have been close to the same age, and something about the way she leaned on that wall wanted to remind me of him, but I didn’t let it. I could already see it would be complicated enough without that, and probably hurt.

• • •

A few years on, Lu and I are both still alive, for reasons maybe some god knows and maybe doesn’t. We are house-sitting in Oakland for one of the regulars, who’s gone off to Thailand for a few weeks. “Probably to molest little boys,” Lu says.

I shush her. “How come you always think the worst of everyone?” She just looks at me, her mouth pulled off to one side of her face, part of her lower lip between her teeth. I turn away, and she blows softly on my cheek, her breath black licorice-ish — she’s been eating it by the pound. Hardly drinking, no drugs for three weeks, the first two at Harbor Lights. Enough time to detox without dying, but not a chance in hell of even that first, let alone twelfth, step. I can’t believe she hasn’t jumped out the window yet. I hold her in place with my incredible will. She lets me. For now.

We are here because it is unfamiliar territory. Not perfect, but Lu doesn’t yet know any of the local kids, the ones on the streets a little farther east, hawking their powdered oblivion. Special. For you. Today .

• • •

Those first months at the bar, right before Wendy died, she and Lu were crashing at a friend’s place in Glen Park, maintaining: Lu still driving a cab sometimes, and Wendy cleaning a few houses, but they were not telling the whole truth. Wendy still looked like she’d just stepped off the porch at Tara — all girl all the time. She smelled exactly like magnolia blossoms, in memory if not in real time. They didn’t tell that she’d fallen backward, wrecked on rosé wine and Mexican Quaaludes, off the deck, and ruptured some critical organ. Too high, too scared to take care of business. Terrified of the emergency room at General: the iodine smell, triage. People utterly ass-out, moaning and raging. Because once you went there, you were officially fucked. Wendy finally died of hoping it would all, somehow, sort of, like it always had, work itself out in the end. When she had gone, Lu came to me, and I tried like hell to figure out a way to keep her.

Pinball was one way, and the guy who came to collect the money usually left a bunch of credits for me. For us.

We had totally different styles. She bashed the hell out of the machine, tilting it and swearing at it, as though it had intentionally done her wrong. “Mother fucker . I oughta—”

“Oughta what?”

“Cut its legs off.”

“Then how would we play?”

“We would sit on the floor, like little children. You could teach me how.”

“Ha-ha. Out of the way. My turn.”

My action was all in the hips, and mentally coaxing the ball to within reach of the flippers. It was an old one, Spanish Eyes, the score racking up by tens in a little square window behind the back glass, the clacking noise like dominoes falling. The gunshot crack of a win or a match sent us into a minor frenzy. A double match: we were untouchable.