Beautiful Kate (19 page)

I had seventy-six dollars on me, all that was left of my farm earnings. And it would go rapidly in a big city, I knew, so I chose a hotel that appeared to be only a step above a flophouse, getting a tiny room with a down-the-hall bath for four dollars a day. The room’s one window opened on a brick wall, and the hammocklike bed reeked of mildew and worse. But I did not plan to be there very much, for that would have meant being alone and having time to think about my problems, when what I wanted was to forget them. Even more, I wanted to establish my sexual independence of Kate. I wanted to prove at least to myself that I was not some kind of incestuous pervert incapable of consummating the act except with his own twin sister. So it was the street I was I interested in, getting drunk and finding girls and having sex—and never thinking about Kate, never thinking about what had happened at the pond.

But over the course of the next few days I found that getting drunk was the sole part of the regimen I seemed able to carry out. The only young and attractive women in the area were whores and strippers, and they were not particularly drawn to an eighteen-year-old who kept most of his money in his shoe. And as for never thinking about Kate, I seemed incapable of doing so for even two minutes in a row. It made no difference whether I was sober and wandering the riverfront or swilling beer in some filthy bar or falling asleep drunk on my hammock bed, Kate remained the empress of my mind. By day it was a thralldom I could handle, but at night, in dreams, it became increasingly terrifying, largely because my unconscious insisted on dragging not only my family onto the scene of our coupling but also the whole frightening menagerie of my childhood nightmares. Great black trampling bulls and mounds of dying birds and wolf-fanged dogs slashing at my feet—all figured in the dreams, right along with my mother, who at one moment would be pounding on my back and pulling at my hair as I continued to thrust into Kate, and at the next moment, despite all my pleas, would slowly and maddeningly
take her place—
this while Jason and Cliff sat watching or finally joined in themselves, dragging a shrieking Kate off through the sopping pondside grass. Sometimes the scene would shift and Kate and I would be copulating under water or in the center of a burning chicken house or as we tumbled down-hill in deep grass, with the dogs steadily ripping at my feet.

I would wake whimpering and sweating in the tiny room, my heart racing as if I had just run the four-forty. Usually I would get up and stagger over to the canted sink to splash cold water on my face, hoping to wake myself, not just for the moment but for the rest of the night if I could manage it. Inevitably, though, I would find my way back to bed and the moment my head hit the pillow again I would be gone, sinking helplessly into the same old abyss of beasts and lust and violence. To sleep was to die a little. And all that week I kept on dying.

By day, I felt more hung over from the dreams than I did from alcohol. And it must have shown in my eyes, for on my second afternoon in town, in a place with sawdust on the floor, a tough-looking river worker came swaying down the bar and propositioned me in a voice loud enough for everyone there to hear. I told him that he had the wrong boy and he called me a liar, saying he knew I was “gay” (a new word to me then) just by the look in my eyes.

“You got pain, cocksucker!” he yelled. “Don’t tell me you ain’t got pain! I can see it!”

I got up from the bar, thinking my size might cool him off, but he kept on coming and finally shoved me backwards, shouting for me to admit it, admit I “liked it.” I had my fists doubled by then and was getting ready to swing on him when the bartender reached out with a baseball bat and prodded him hard in the ribs.

“Out,” the bartender said.

Only that, the one word, but it was enough to send the bastard on his way and to let me get back to my beer. I did so without any sense of relief or pleasure, though, for I was feeling oddly humiliated by then. I wanted desperately to leave the dump and get away from the amused and knowing looks the old-timers were casting my way. But even more, I did not want to leave and have them thinking that I had gone to meet with my propositioner. So I stayed for another hour at least, grimly drinking beer and eating rubbery popcorn and wondering what the hell the homo could have seen in my eyes. Was it that indelible, I wondered, the mark of the pervert, the sex criminal? My mark.

By my third or fourth day in St. Louis, I was spending a lot of time in a strip joint named the Lucky-O, much of it waiting for evening and the appearance of “Ginger Baby,” a honey blond dancer with long sinuous legs and a perfectly hypnotic ass. A trucker sitting next to me at the bar one night said that her “going rate” was a hundred dollars an hour and that she always had plenty of takers. He himself was trying to lay aside a few bucks every week so he too one day could join that fortunate lineup at her door after hours.

As I sat there sipping Budweiser and watching her on the ramp behind the bar, it began to dawn on me that what had me staring at her with such slackjawed fascination was not her kinetic sexuality so much as the fact that she could have been an incarnation of Kate, only older and coarser, her eyes unlit by a kindred intelligence. Still the physical similarity was enough so that I soon had given up beer alone for the faster oblivion of boilermakers. And when she came on again, hours later, I got up and stumbled out into the reeking riverfront night, for a few panicky moments not sure where I was or even who I was. I remember being crowded off the sidewalk by a pair of hookers and their dates. And I remember climbing the stairs at the hotel and clattering into my room, there to fall face-down on the hammock bed to sleep through the rest of that night and much of the following day.

Hung over and miserable, I treated myself to a late afternoon breakfast of steak and eggs and hash browns, washed down with Jereboams of fresh orange juice and coffee. I overtipped the waitress and walked down to the jetty to watch the great river flowing past, so muddy one would have thought it long ago would have carried the entire Midwest out to sea. I watched the light drain from the sky and then I dutifully marched back to the Lucky-O, this time sitting at a rear table and sticking patiently with mugs of Budweiser all through the evening, even when Ginger Baby finally came out onto the tiny stage and provocatively peeled down to a G-string and pasties. I watched the other strippers and I sat through the dragging intervals between shows. I stayed there until closing time and then I went back to my hotel room and again slept through much of the next day, once more having a huge late breakfast and wandering around the riverfront until night fell and it was time again to return to the Lucky-O and my ardent eyeball affair with my twin’s double.

On that night, though, I waited on the sidewalk after closing, and when she finally emerged, with two other strippers, I asked if I could walk her home. It seemed to me a straight enough question, but Ginger Baby found it funny. Laughing, she asked the other girls if they wanted to adopt a baby boy, and they laughed too. Like a perfect jerk, I just stood there for a time with the rest of the sidewalk crowd gazing at the three girls as they piled into a cab and drove off. Then I caught myself and hurried on, having already heard enough jibes and laughter at my expense. Still not wanting to go back to my room, I thought I would try to find an after-hours club somewhere. But I had gone only a short distance when a smiling black woman suddenly reached out and took hold of my arm.

“Fuck them white chicks,” she said. “You don’t need ’em. You got you mama now.”

She asked me how much money I had and I shrewdly told her ten bucks, figuring that what was in my shoe was my own business.

“Sheeit,” she said, “that ain’t enough to drink on—and forgit the rest.”

“Sorry about that.” I started to pull my arm free, but she held on tighter.

“Now, don’t be in such a hurry, boy,” she said. “Where you headed?”

“Home.”

Under the streetlight, she gave me a look of extravagant suspicion. “You mean you don’t want you mama?”

I tried to smile. “I’m pretty drunk.”

“Well, me too, honey!” She laughed and gave my arm a squeeze. “So why don’t we just see what we can work out, huh? Together?”

We went down an alley and up another street for a couple of blocks and then she took my hand and guided me through four or five black men sitting on a tenement stoop drinking wine and smoking what I thought were home-made cigarettes. They ignored me totally and I followed the woman into a hallway so foul-smelling that I immediately pulled away from her on the rickety staircase.

“It stinks in here,” I said.

“Not in my place it don’t, honey. You just come on along.”

On the second floor she banged on an apartment door and got a gallon of red unlabeled wine from the man inside. Then she pulled me on up to the third floor and into her own apartment, which smelled only slightly less foul than the stairwell.

“Well, this is it, honey,” she said. “This is Mama’s paradise.”

The only light in the place came from a television set, a black and white test pattern dimly illuminating two little girls sleeping peacefully on the floor. On a nearby cot a smaller boy and girl also lay asleep, tangled and sucking their thumbs. Across the sparsely furnished room an older girl stood rubbing her eyes in the doorway to a bedroom.

“What you got there?” she asked her mother.

“None you damn bidness, chile. You just go back to bed. And you feed the babies in the morning. You hear?”

The girl nodded and retreated into the bedroom and I wondered how many more children were in there with her. Mama meanwhile had picked two glasses out of the sink and rinsed them. And now she shuffled on into a second bedroom, this one lit by a large red Budweiser sign three or four blocks away, standing sentinel over one of the river bridges. She poured us each a drink and then she sat back on the bed, bowing it with her ample hams.

“Well, what do you think of you mama?” she asked. “And what do you think of Mama’s place?”

“Fine,” I said. “Both fine.”

In truth, the woman did have nice warm eyes and a beautiful smile, but she was dark brown and heavy and the grease of her processed hair looked as if it had been troweled on. We could drink together, I thought, but only that. Anything else was out of the question.

“You ever had a Latin lady before?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Then let’s see you money, honey.”

“I don’t want sex,” I stammered. “I’ve had too much to drink.”

She laughed again, the same rich easy laugh. “Baby, nobody ever gits that much.”

“I do.”

She cocked her head at me. “What you so sad about? Purty young white thing like you.”

“I’m not sad.”

“Sure you is.” She took a drink of the wine and nodded at me. “Come on, drink up, chile. We got a long ways to go.”

As I drank, she kicked off her shoes and slipped out of her dress, which was all she had on except for her brassiere. I watched, mesmerized, as she undid the clasp on the brassiere and let her great fat breasts spill out. Naked, she looked like a mound of basketballs.

“I got to be going,” I said.

“Sheeit, you do. You just come here a minute, baby. One little minute and then you still want to go, fine, I let you go. I even wave you bye.”

I was drunk enough so that it was not hard to do nothing, let her take me by the shoulders and sit me down onto the bed and then just loll back and watch as she pulled off my pants and shorts. She smiled up at me and then abruptly buried her shining black head in my lap, and immediately I could feel the rush beginning, the blood and heat and joy surging to the touch of her mouth and tongue. She let out a laugh and looked up at me.

“So you gots to be goin’, does you?”

From that point on, the night took on the character of what my colleagues and I inevitably call a montage sequence: random frames lifted here and there out of a long reel of time. I remember my black “mama” sitting astride me like a Buddha playing jockey, laughing and whooping and rocking the bed as her older daughter, holding a crying infant, stood watching us in the doorway. In another frame the baby is lying next to us and Mama is cooing to it and tickling it with one hand while with the other she guides me into yet another of her orifices. And then there is the drinking, the taste and smell of too-sweet wine as we sit on the bed in the crimson gloom among dozing children and pass the bottle and laugh and begin again. I remember going to the bathroom a few times, adding to the foul blocked mess already in it, and I remember her taking the money out of my pants, though not out of my shoe—when and how that happened, I still don’t know.

But in time even the individual frames began to blur and later I remembered only vaguely a huge black man abruptly appearing on the scene, switching on lights and knocking over chairs and even tipping over the bed—with us in it—flipping it as if it were a mat. I remember the screaming of Mama and the girls and I remember my fear as he came at me. But the fight itself—the beating, that is—I have only glimpses of: the sudden pain and the taste of blood, the sensation of falling and crawling and finally tumbling down the stairs and getting up only to fall again, and finally plunging out into the riverfront night without any clothes on, limping and bleeding my way down the street. I recall the oldest daughter coming out of nowhere and throwing my clothes and shoes at me, then running off. Too drunk to get into them, I carried the clothes down an alley and crawled back behind some garbage cans and empty boxes, and lay down. There I remember hearing a soft moaning sound, my own voice echoing out of one of the cardboard boxes I lay among. And then there was nothing, not even the sensation of falling.