Free Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips

circles I could crush to my thumb. Under her heavy hair, her damp temples, I want to feel the shape of her skull. My hands are deaf. Eyes stony with light she watches me try to see the road, her opaled eyes seeming to come out at me yet falling back in their deep oil that scalds the side of my face.
    I pull over, stop the truck, get out, lean against it. Up the road a café, all night lights still on, runs a lit band of letters around its roof: hamburgers, thick shakes, onion rings fried gold. I walk up there and a woman with her hair dyed brass swabs the counter with a rag. Her wide grin red, her front tooth gold, she lets me talk and counting change she fingers my palm.
    Ice cream packed hard melts slow on my hands as I’m walking back. I see Rita hitching by the side of the road. I hand her a cone, get in the truck and start the engine. She climbs in. Motor idling, sweet cold in our mouths, I pull her across the seat and press my fingers hard at the base of her neck. My breath comes out a ragged curve against her eyes.
    WATCHING
    He so in love with her it was something to see. Dude so caught up and dedicated like a single eye to his own loving. How she touched it off. I suppose he was about to pack it inbefore he saw her and thought there was still something to do. Walking up the hill, touching him with her hip and walking, she moved; her hip was delicate and blue beside his thigh.
    This was El Paso, 1965. She danced in topless bars, said really she was a painter but she needed supplies. Supplies she said are always hard to get, sometimes you just have to put out and get them and go off with them. It was plain he wanted to go off with her but in the summer in El Paso it’s hard to move anywhere except down the street to the bars. I remember there was always dog puke on the sidewalks in El Paso. All those strays get the sweats around noon and bring up the garbage they ate in the back alleys of beanerys at dawn. Think about Texas and there’s those skinny fanned ribs heaving.
    Dude used to go down to Bimpy’s nights and watch her dance. Bimpy was a greasy-kneed old faggot who liked him plenty and gave us free bourbon. She’d come over between songs and do a number with us, wringing with sweat so she’d wet the paper and we’d have to keep lighting it. She danced on this three-foot-square red stage, under two old ceiling fans that looked like little airplane propellers. She moved under their sleepy drone; always there was something about to break out. From our table in the corner I could smell the old roses smell of her. She was dark-haired and black-eyed though she swore she wasn’t Spanish, medium-sized but small-boned with green apple breasts; then suddenly her twisted child-bearing hips that were somehow off-center and rolled gentle to the left when she walked, rolling slow up the hill past the plate glass liquor stores. Dancing, she’d throw her dusty scent past the two old spots Bimpy had and the cowboys threw bills on the stage. Dude hated the dancing; said she was frigid as hellafterward, like loving a wind-up doll except for her mouth and the curves it took on in the dark. She wouldn’t even move with the lights on, he said.
    After the show she’d stay and help Bimp sweep up and then we’d walk out the door into the oily night. Everything wide awake and the fat yam-skinned women talking Spanish to their boyfriends, walking with their stemmed words and twined fingers past the blank-eyed 5 & 10’s. We’d walk up the hill, they in front and me trailing behind. She talked in her Texas voice about nothing usually, it just being important there in the lit-up black to have her voice with its honeyed drawl and bitter edge; she walking slope slide up the hill, whisper of her nylons brushing and the Mexican boys shooting craps on the sidewalk. They ain’t but thirteen, she’d say when they looked up at her heels clicking, Old enough. My daddy made a small fortune at craps. He used to call it dealin with the