Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips Page A

shaking by the sink, cold water on her wrists, and we look at each other. They say the world ends in fire and ice; I say it’s already over. That hot pavement burns you straight through; that’s why I did it, kept moving—no slow cooking and my claws raking walls. These streets, raunchy brass, my feet on fire burns up that dead ice.
    I split way south with a rich dude. Red birds and black-eyed men. Been some since then. I’m doing OK, I got it made, and the cold don’t come so much now.
    RITA
    I lived with Dude those months in two rooms, rickety bed on blocks and past the windows the roof steamed between shingles. Long afternoons I cut the thin tar bubbles with my nails, oils warm on the paper, and the tubes heated till their lettering came off in my hands. I drew the trains: red gashes and the tracks black rips underneath. His hands felt furred with dust. When he was roofing, tar smudged the lines and crosses in his palms, left the whorls of his fingers and their black smell on my hips. Some days we stayed in bed, kept the fans turning, buzzing; we had cold wine and coarsebrown bread. At night the bars were crowded with drunks, some of them sick in the heat. Dancing, I didn’t watch them; I saw the flat brushed land outside the house in La Rosa, looking tawny-colored from the shaded rooms, but out there, walking, you felt hard hot sand and the color spreads into a wasted brown.
    I think of what happened and it happens each time the same way. When I go back they are padding the cart with skins. Inside in his bed the child’s face is drawn and blue. He breathes faint strangled bleats and my mother waits, sewing pelts to wrap him. At dark she feels his throat and says there’s no breath; we leave with the cart. In the skins his face is white and his light hair long as a girl’s. The hitched mule swings its head, flares nostrils at the fresh smell and moves skittish toward the hills. The old man bends in brimmed hat, shuffles to low chant, and she walks behind, scatters fine powder on the ground. Cart rocking slow and the child’s face in my lap is sunken, lids on rolled eyes tight closed. All night we keep moving on the sloped land. Sand rolls its barren striped bars; the sky is inked and slashed in the foothills where we stop, take bundled wood from the cart, tie it with cords. She knots leather in the dark and the old man’s voice is hoarse. At dawn she piles brush and the corded wood; we lift the child, straining, jangling the bracelets on his arms. She lights dried skins wrapped on a stick, touches him, and he starts to burn. The wood catches and through the fire I think I see his face move. It moves again and I throw her back, digging, clawing at the hot wood under him. They watch me try to reach him, now he is all fire. Running around the stench I fall and their old faces over me say I only dreamed it. I smell the skins and his flesh, the incense burning under him.
    Mule leading then down the ravine to where the lightstretches out on land like a smooth film of egg. I stumble and touch the animal’s hide, feel ribs under stiff mousy hair. The old man walks ahead, his back a leathered board under cloth. She stays there by the smell until it is finished; quiet, she waits to take the bones.
    Hours walking, sun high and the road a sudden empty strip. The old man waits for me, then turns in the glare and tells me again that I dreamed it. I see his knife and serape on his waist, know he’s not going back for her. I won’t go back to her either. Smoke in my mouth, I smell the wheeling birds and the tight white face behind the bristled fire. Old man walking away on the road with his mule and there are trucks, horns, voices, Baby wanna ride?
    DUDE
    I remember the rains had started, blown in off the Gulf. She’d been to La Rosa. Always when she came back she was this hunted dog, stringy and gutted and ready to gnaw its own foot. I came in and she was walking circles in the room, rubbing her hands. I saw her fingers