Free Corregidora (Bluestreak) by Gayl Jones Page A

Cat’s,” he said. “She said something crazy about going back to Versailles cause her roots was there. I told her her roots was wherever she take them. She said naw your roots are where you was born and you can’t pull them up, the only thing you can do is cut yourself away from them but they still be there.”
    “Well, you can’t sew yourself back onto them,” I said. Then I thought that seemed a plea for her staying, but I didn’t care.
    “I finally told her to do whichever way she feel it,” he said. “I had to tell her something. She act like she was looking for my approval or something. I just told her to do it the way she feel it. I told her she got all her customers here though.”
    “What did she say?”
    “She said she try to get customers there too, and if she can’t, then she do whatever she have to.”
    I said nothing.
    “I told her to take care of herself. You going over there to see her before she leave, ain’t you?”
    “Yeah,” I said, but I knew I wasn’t going over there. I asked him when was she leaving. He said probably tomorrow morning.
    “I said we be coming down to see her, but she said she didn’t know where she was going to live yet. That’s funny, ain’t it?”
    I said it was funny.
    I went in to take a bath and get ready for the supper show.
    Jim would still come in sometimes to have a beer, but now I didn’t say nothing to him and he didn’t say nothing to me. I’d got over my feeling that he was spying for Mutt. Maybe he was just spying for hisself. Mutt never stood outside the window anymore. I never even saw him by accident out on the street, or down in town anywhere, and nobody I knew had seen him. I was glad. It probably meant he really was gone.
    “It don’t hurt anymore?” he asked.
    “Naw.”
    He was inside me now. I was holding his back. There was still a kind of tension in my belly.
    “You fine, baby,” he was saying. “There’s nobody like you.”
    I was struggling against him, trying to feel what I wasn’t feeling. Then he reached down and fingered my clitoris, which made me feel more. He stopped. “Please, honey.” He fingered again. I wrapped my legs around his back, the feeling inside me. Tension in my belly, like a fist drawn up. “Please.” He kept on.
    “What am I doing to you, Ursa? What am I doing to you?”
    I kept struggling with him. I made a sound in my throat. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. What I felt didn’t have words.
    “Am I fucking you?”
    “You fucking me.”
    “What are we doing, Ursa?”
    “We fucking.”
    He dug his finger up my asshole. I contracted against him. “You fucking me. Yes, you fucking me.” He fingered my clit again, but it was painful now. “It hurts,” I fretted. He took his hand away. I kept moving with him, not feeling it now. I waited till his convulsions were over. His sperm inside me. Then we lay back together, exhausted, ready to sleep.
    “Urs, he’s going to wont more.”
    “He knows what I ain’t got. Don’t talk to me. I don’t know you.”
    “What do you mean you don’t know me? I was in your hole before he even knew you had one.”
    “At least I still got one, ain’t I? You didn’t take that away from me.”
    “I couldn’t if I tried.”
    “Did you?”
    Sperm to bruise me. Wash it away. Vinegar and water. Barbed wire where a womb should be. Curdled milk.
    “Did I displease you so much?”
    “Naw, you didn’t displease me.”
    I came to you. Why didn’t you want me? I lay on my belly waiting. That’s what a woman waits for. To be fucked. A woman always waits to be fucked. Why didn’t you? Now I’m without feeling.
    “Was I so bad?”
    “Naw, you wasn’t bad.”
    “Did you forget so soon? I know you from way back, Ursa. That’s what I said, didn’t I? But you’ve forgotten.”
    “Naw I haven’t forgotten. I’m still thick with you. I can’t get you out.”
    “Does it feel good?”
    “No.”
    “Really, Urs? Really no good?”
    “Yes. I mean,