Free Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips Page B

black hair in the sheets a wound thread, thick black lines of drawings she kept hidden, her charcoaled fingertips. She worked on the avenue, turned tricks in a hotel room with a blue ceiling and one light bulb in a fringed shade. I told her she had to stop it and she said well, she’d dance but she wasn’t carrying noslop to farmers in a beanery. The difference is, she said, I say how I’m used.
    By noon those days I was a walking fever, my hands cut and sore from tarring feed store roofs, and since I first saw her I come into the heat the place the heat like a bitch dog and lived with it. When I got home it was late evening and she lay almost naked on the roof. Past crooked streets the tracks ran off white, cutting their light and crossing. Sluggish trains changed cars in the hard-baked yard. Beside her on the shingled heat, I smelled her salt skin and she laughed, pulled my face to her throat. We rolled, hot shingles pressed to my back, and later the shower was cold. We drank iced whiskey in jelly glasses and she danced up the hall dripping, throwing water off her hair. In the stifled space, window at the end painted over and light through the cracked paint patterned on the floor, her back was beaded and swaying. Water backed up past the drain spilled cold past my feet onto the floor and in our rooms we wet the sheets, slept in their damp. Her hair looped in my hands dried slow: past us the trains whistled their open howls.
    It was too hot to cook and we ate avocados, jalapeños, white cheese. City lights came on, blue and pink neon stood out cool and she leaning into the mirror painted her face for the bar. I forget all of it but her lacquered eyes. And she stepping off the curb in those high-heeled shoes, kids in Chevys grinning.
    Sometimes she came back from Bimp’s so late the light was coming up. Been with a john: she only did it she said when the money was too good to pass up. She’d come home with a bottle of brandy, get into bed with a pack of cards and we’d play poker to win till the sun was flat on the floor. Cards buckled finally and thrown against the wall, shadesdrawn, we lay there see, until we could talk. Her face in the white bed, her face by the window; light behind the shade as she stood there colored her face blurred and fading like a photograph. It’s all right just come here.
    BIMP
    Like I said, I had another dancer. She was blond, from the East, up North I think. She had the look of someone didn’t sweat much, just burned a coal inside. Ran off finally with some slick Mex to Panama. Could tell easy she was one to leave home over and over till her feet wore down to a root that just planted where she ran out of steam. The men liked that white hair and light eyes and those rhinestone shoes she wore. She had that hard crumpled look of a dame that’s been around but don’t know why. I knew she was thirty-five but I hired her anyway. Them white blonds is scarce down here.
    I put em onstage together the first night and they set up a wheel the whole place was turning on, what with the smaller one and her seventeen-year-old’s tits and them hips moving so you knew she’d been used since she was old enough to wiggle. Them border girls start with big brother in the alley, them towns full of female things dropping litters in the street. She moved with that clinched dark face, all of it a fist in her hips, and beside her the tall blond looked like a movie magazine none of em could touch. There was some kind of confusion, smelled like burning rubber. Spilt drinks and a goddamn brawl in the back at the card table. I got em offstage and turned up the lights and ordered everyone out of the place. Was just me picking up broken glass and the girls leaning by the bar and the two men dealing a hand at thecorner table like nothing happened. The girls were dressed, the blond fooling with her necklace, talking low. Her blue eyes drinking that Spanish mouth she say soft, Hey Honey, how long you figure on dancing