“Huh.”
“I can say it again right away, if you like: Declan.”
“Didn’t forget it yet.”
“Yeah, but now if you do, you got an extra copy in storage.”
“Funny man.”
“Do my best.”
“Declan. Sound like a brand name. Some cleanin’ fluid or someting.”
“Good old Irish name my dad gave me. Know about Ireland?”
“Whoa. . Got anoder fag?”
“Sure.”
“Got a dime for de jukebox?”
He fishes a dime out of his pocket, still doing subtractions in his head: he’ll manage without his coffee tomorrow morning, and anyhow, no two ways about it, he’ll have to swallow his pride and head back up to the farm later this week.
“What’s your pleasure?” “Lady Day,” says Awinita at the same time, and this time they really laugh.
She slips off the stool and struts over to join him at the box. Despite the curve of pregnancy, her whore-strut is touchingly childlike, so much so that he surmises she might be underage after all and his heart wrenches with wanting her. “Love it,” says he, and as his left hand inserts the dime and punches in “Baby Get Lost,” his right hand slides around the girl’s thickened waist as though it were home. When, turning, she smiles up at him and murmurs, “Hey, baby, you’re sweet,” he pulls her close.
We can CUT here. . find them together later, after the payment and the act, naked amidst a tumble of dirty bedsheets in a cruddy little bedroom above the bar? No. . Be with Awinita in the thick of it, her eyes widening in surprise as Declan, having gotten things under way in the traditional galloping-stallion manner of human males under the age of twenty-five, slows down, withdraws and moves to do her good. We see his head bobbing just beyond her belly swell. .
(Yeah, you’re right, Milo, that could be tricky to get past the MPAA — don’t want an R rating, to say nothing of an X — well, we’ll cross that river when we get to it, hey? Dream first, cut later, you always used to tell me. .)
We slip into Awinita’s mind. A huge bird flies across the sky with a great rushing noise. It touches the sun and bursts into flame. It tumbles over and over in the air, burning, dropping away, until it vanishes behind a distant hill. .
When we open our eyes, Declan has moved back inside of us, gently but passionately.
“You’re so lovely,” he murmurs. “You’re so lovely. .”
They are dressed again and sitting on the bed side by side. The spaces between their sentences are huge. Awinita strokes the back of Declan’s neck with one finger.
“Never done it wit a Indian girl?”
“Nope. Specially not with a pregnant Indian girl. . Who’s the poppa, Nita?”
“A guy.”
“A gone guy?”
“Yeah, gone.”
“Well, how far along are you?”
“Ah. . baby s’pose to be here like in May or June. Got a fag?”
“Sure. . You’re nice, Nita. You’re amazing.”
“You’re not bad, too, Mister Irish Declan.”
“Not everyone would agree with you on that.”
“Some people tink you bad?”
He laughs. “Plenty of people. Guys up at Bordeaux, to start with.”
“You been in de jug?”
“Just got out yesterday.”
“Yeah? In for long?”
“Coupla weeks.”
“What dey nail you for?”
“Said I stole a car.”
“You didn’t?”
“Nah. I just. . you know. . borrowed it.”
“From who?”
“Sister of mine.”
Awinita releases her low laugh.
“Nah. .”
“I swear.”
“You take your sister’s car and she call de cops on you? Some broderly love!”
“I got a whole slew of brothers and sisters. Unfortunately Marie-Thérèse is the only one owns a car, and she’s also the meanest.”
“Marie-Thérèse? Don’t sound Irish.”
“Our ma’s French and our pa’s Irish, so in our family the girls got French names and speak French and the boys got Irish names and speak English.”
“Why not Irish?”
“’Cause the British occupied Ireland for six hundred years and made us lose our language.”
“Why not British, den?” mutters Awinita, but Declan doesn’t hear her because the drink is making him voluble.
“Point is, the boys gotta work. Can’t get a job worth shit if you’re francophone.”
“You got a good job den, Declan?”
“Nah, you kiddin’? I got a black-sheep reputation to live up to.”
She barks a laugh; he pulls her to him and revels in the feel of her firm, round tummy pushed up against his rib cage. “Wouldn’t be caught dead with a good job,” he adds, and she laughs again, though not quite as loudly.
CUT to the bar, which has filled up with customers in the meantime.
Elated, Awinita purchases real drinks with one of the two five-dollar bills Declan gave her. The barman glowers at her when he sets their glasses on the bar but she turns her back on him saying, “Keep cool, Irwin,” and spins her stool toward Declan.
“I don’t get how you can call the cops on one o’ your own family.”
“Marie-Thérèse wants me out of the family. She’d kick me off the family property if she could. Says I’m a good-for-nothing.”
“You good for someting, man.”
They laugh.
“Ah, but she doesn’t know about that, eh? She’s already married and a mom, goin’ on for thirty. I’m twenty-four, how ‘bout you, Nita?”
“. .”
“Hey. . you’re not underage, are you?”
“. .”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus got notin’ to do wid it. I been in de trade tree years already, help my moder out to feed de family. Your sister, she respectable and put her own broder in jail. How Jesus s’pose to figure dat out?”
Again they laugh, inebriated. Euphoria seeps into them. Declan knocks back his drink.
“Ever since she got her poor lumberjack of a fiancé to buy her a three-carat diamond, Marie-Thérèse thinks she’s better than the rest of us. Poor Régis. . He went into debt to pay for that ring. .”
Billie Holiday sings “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness if I Do” and the two of them dance close, Awinita leaning into Declan’s shoulder with her eyes pressed shut.
A white woman, her face a blur, has fastened a sparkling diamond brooch to her throat. Bright red blood trickles down in two lines on either side of her jugular vein. .
CUT.
• • • • •
II. GINGA
From gingare, to lollop from side to side. The basic capoeira movement, which keeps the body in a perpetual state of swing.
Milo, 1952–56
A BABY. In these scenes, we can alternate between objective and subjective camera, be now inside, now outside the baby’s head, the baby’s eyes. A screaming, skinny, jittery, seizure-prone baby, brought to this publicly-owned Catholic hospital at age three weeks and left there. Abandoned with relief by a man whose hands were shaking.
The world is fuzzy. Moving shapes, lots of white. Women’s voices, shrill or harsh. Clipped syllables. Snippets of language — but that, too, is fuzzy, tone rather than words. The sisters all speak French.
“Garbage. . A little piece of human garbage.”
“Human? Are you sure?”
“Now, now, sister. Jesus loves us all.”
“Hard to believe sometimes. Born in withdrawal. .”
The kid’s in a cot, surrounded by other kids in cots. Large, white female shapes move jerkily up and down the rows of cots. Close-ups on female hands. Reddish fingers emerging from starched white sleeves. Swiftly and unceremoniously, they change the infant’s clothes and diapers, bathe it, feed it from a glass baby bottle, set it back in its cot.