Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips

with that swayback of yours and that funny hip—damn, can you get this thing fastened—no, here—Lemme put it on and you can maybe pinch it with your teeth—She leans over the Spanish, her red lips apart like she’s still talking, beer tipped in her hand and dripping all over their stockings. And the smaller one, black hair to her waist, hands midway in the air, stands there like a stone saying over and over, I can’t fix it, I can’t fix it.
    After that I had em alternate nights and a week later the blond split. The cowboy and his sidekick was in here nights with the Spanish, the two of em diddling with cards and race forms in the corner. Figure it’s been ten years ago. Gave me a few good tips and then same as now—when I hit at the track I blow it all same night, ain’t nobody gonna tell me I won nothin.
    THE BLOND
    Rita. She left the avenue, the hotel, smell of urine and spent sex in the halls. We traded johns and other things; me by her door in blue light, cognac in my hand and my robe open. I asked her low, A toast to the hungry jokers? mouth on my raised glass and she let me in …
    She let on like we never knew each other, but them hot nights I told her stories. Like how it was when I was seventeen like her. Ginette Hatcher was my name then, in Maine all the gray years. She born and died in Maine, she dying there still I guess. I took the name the first truck driver gave me, called me Babe and I answered to it ever since. I left myhusband that I only saw in the dark after the boats came in or before they went out, that man always cold and fish slime on his hands. I left soon as the baby was born, thinking the best anyone could tell the kid was that Mama took off. There something out there besides that gray wet, that heavy roll. My cousins and uncles was all lobstermen ever since I can remember. My dad too, but he died when I was so young all he is to me is a furred chest and smell of oiled rope. He died of lobster is what Mom said, and she killed hundreds of them. Scratch-clink of those claws against the boiling pot was a woman sound, a metallic scratch round as rings.
    Wind and rock and weeds on the beach a gray stink, no color cold; I kept fish eyes in bottles and sold them all summer to the tourists, to the queers and dandies and the painted old things with poodles. Once an old woman with money asked me to come to her hotel and read the Bible to her. She opened it and I started in. After a while I looked up and she was staring out the window like a sleepwalker, her old hat in her lap. She said what a blessed child I was to come to womanhood here by the sea, so far from heat and corruption. I said Yes Ma’am. The fire comes from the feet, she said, from the walkers and the black hair. She didn’t see me anymore. I grabbed my sweater and ran home across the hotel beach, the big umbrellas blind and rolling on their sides. I found twenty dollars folded in my pocket and I bought me some red patent leather spike heels. I hid them in my room and only put them on at night and I was the walker walking and the dancer dancing in my fiery feet, and holes in the floor where I burned through.
    Tires on the big trucks burn. You smell them in the cab, smell the motor boiling; my suitcase wedged between my knees and the truckers touching my dress. I lived everywhere and been to Mexico. I danced mostly, waited tables,worked in a library once and couldn’t feel my feet for the shiny floor. Down in Texas any man on the street would buy me supper. By the time I got to Bimp’s those nights I was already loaded. Blur, dark oiled skins past the lights, ice in glasses. Cold melts in a circle, hot whiskey, hot Texas. And Rita shows up, so smooth and so hot; eyes like black glass, sunk in, burned young. Onstage she scared me, made that cold ocean roll in my head … then the lights were on, jeers from the floor, and that little pimp pushing us stumbling into the dressing room. Where I lean against the wall and watch her