Free The Girl With the Golden Shoes by Colin Channer Page B

talks to you, you’d ask me to marry you right now. My talks is like a sweet rum punch. It nice you when it going down, but when you done you feel regret, ’cause it will drunk you and make you give away you life.”
    “So I pretty then?”
    “Like the moon right there.”
    She leaned forward and craned her head and saw it. It was bright and almost full, and as she felt it pulling at romantic feelings in her liquid depths, the driver asked her faintly, “I could touch you leg?”
    “I don’t think so,” she said, then fired: “Touch my leg for what?”
    Respectfully, he answered, “So I could give a good accounting to my son.”
    The moon illuminated certain passions. She was grateful for the ride, and flattered that he’d choose her for his son. Plus the cab felt oddly safe, safe in the way of a studio, a place in which to probe around. Try new things. Test limits. Rehearse.
    “But don’t go too far,” she said, and dropped her forearm in the crevice where her pelvis met her thigh. The driver’s touch was quick and light, more a test of ripeness than a fondle or caress. She took his hand and held it and they rode in swollen silence for a while.
    When they reached the intersection with the coastal road he came around to help her from the cab.
    “You’re a beautiful girl,” he told her. “My son deserves a girl like you. Some men ain’t like a girl with lip. But I like a little lip. Is the ones who ain’t like to talk I can’t take. See…if they ain’t like to talk, they like to brood. I can’t take a woman who just stare at you over breakfast when she vex. When they look at you that brooding way, you lose the taste for food. When a woman gimme lip I take it, smile, then eat my blasted food. But when they stare at me like that, oh God.” He felt he’d said too much and tapped her on the chin. “But look. I running. God bless you. I glad you make me change my mind.”
    “A man never tell me I beautiful, you know, so I don’t know what to say.”
    Across the street she saw the orange light of bottle torches glowing in the stalls where old negritas dressed in skirts and turbans sold small fritters made from black-eyed peas and served with pepper sauce, along with cuts of fried shark. She could also see the silhouettes of dogs and milling people, and smell the garlic marinade in which the cuts of shark were left to soak all day before the old negritas dipped them in the cornmeal batter, turning them to make the grainy mixture cream the meat, which they’d slide into the iron pots that had been used by their grandmothers, and the batter-covered meat would settle in the oily depths where all the salty flavor lurked and gain a brittle shell.
    Beneath the smell of fish there was the wheaty fragrance of the heavy bread the fat negritas baked in ovens built from lime and brick right there beside the road, round loaves that came out bronzed and dusty with the smoky taste of coals.
    Estrella was warmed by all of this—the smell of food, her conversation, and the sound of happy voices crackling like a splash of water dripping in hot oil.
    Her head began to sink toward her shoulder when the driver stepped up on the running board and sat alone inside the cab.
    “If you ever pass again, come by the distillery gate and ask for me,” he said. “Xavier Joseph. Everybody know me down there. Just call my name.”
    She wanted to say something romantic, but all the words she thought about just felt so damn untrue.
    “If you ever get a message that a girl name Cinderella by the gate,” she said, believing that the meaning would be lost on him, “you’ll bound to know is me.”
    They looked at each other the way people do when time begins to curl and stretch as if it were a lazy cat.
    “Come,” he said, and slapped the door. “Lemme take you further down.”
    They quickly left the stalls behind, and moved along a flat, unpopulated coast. The road held closely to the water, which she heard above the engine,