Bride read the words twice, understanding little if anything. It was the second page that made her uncomfortable.
Her imagination is impeccable the way it cuts and scrapes the bone never touching the marrow where that dirty feeling is thrumming like a fiddle for fear its strings will break and screech the loss of its tune since for her permanent ignorance is so much better than the quick of life.
Queen, having finished washing the dishes, offered her guest a drink of whiskey. Bride declined.
Reading the third page, she thought she remembered a conversation she’d had with Booker that could have provoked what he wrote, the one in which she described the landlord and details of her childhood.
You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger’s curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.
Bride read three more pages in quick succession.
Trying to understand racist malignancy only feeds it, makes it balloon-fat and lofty floating high overhead fearful of sinking to earth where a blade of grass could puncture it letting its watery feces soil the enthralled audience the way mold ruins piano keys both black and white, sharp and flat to produce a dirge of its decay.
I refuse to be ashamed of my shame, you know, the one assigned to me which matches the low priority and the degraded morality of those who insist upon this most facile of human feelings of inferiority and flaw simply to disguise their own cowardice by pretending it is identical to a banjo’s purity.
Thank you. You showed me rage and frailty and hostile recklessness and worry worry worry dappled with such uncompromising shards of light and love it seemed a kindness in order to be able to leave you and not fold into a grief so deep it would break not the heart but the mind that knows the oboe’s shriek and the way it tears into rags of silence to expose your beauty too dazzling to contain and which turns its melody into the grace of livable space.
Puzzled, Bride raised her eyes from the pages and looked at Queen, who said, “Interesting, is it?”
“Very,” answered Bride. “But strange too. I wonder who he was talking to.”
“Himself,” said Queen. “I bet they’re all about him. Don’t you think so?”
“No,” murmured Bride. “These are about me, our time together.” Then she read the last page.
You should take heartbreak of whatever kind seriously with the courage to let it blaze and burn like the pulsing star it is unable or unwilling to be soothed into pathetic self-blame because its explosive brilliance rings justifiably loud like the din of a tympani.
Bride put the papers down and covered her eyes.
“Go see him,” said Queen, her voice low. “He’s down the road, the last house beside the stream. Come on, get up, wash your face and go.”
“I’m not sure I should, now.” Bride shook her head. She had counted on her looks for so long — how well beauty worked. She had not known its shallowness or her own cowardice — the vital lesson Sweetness taught and nailed to her spine to curve it.
“What’s the matter with you?” Queen sounded annoyed. “You come all this way and just turn around and leave?” Then she started singing, imitating the voice of a baby:
Don’t know why
There’s no sun up in the sky…
Can’t go on.
Everything I had is gone,
Stormy weather…
“Damn!” Bride slapped the table. “You’re absolutely right! Totally right! This is about me, not him. Me!”
—
“You? Get out!” Booker rose from his narrow bed and pointed at Bride, who was standing in the door of his trailer.
“Fuck you! I’m not leaving here until you—”
“I said get out! Now!” Booker’s eyes were both dead and alive with hatred. His uncast arm pointed toward the door. Bride ran nine quick steps forward and slapped Booker’s face as hard as she could. He hit her back with just enough force to knock her down. Scrambling up, she grabbed a Michelob bottle from a counter and broke it over his head. Booker fell back on his bed, motionless. Tightening her fist on the neck of the broken bottle, Bride stared at the blood seeping into his left ear. A few seconds later he regained consciousness, leaned on his elbow and, with squinty, unfocused eyes, turned to look at her.
“You walked out on me,” she screamed. “Without a word! Nothing! Now I want that word. Whatever it is I want to hear it. Now!”
Booker, wiping blood from the left side of his face with his right hand, snarled, “I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“Oh, yes you do.” She raised the broken bottle.
“You get out of my house before something bad happens.”
“Shut up and answer me!”
“Jesus, woman.”
“Why? I have to know, Booker.”
“First tell me why you bought presents for a child molester — in prison for it, for Christ’s sake. Tell me why you sucked up to a monster.”
“I lied! I lied! I lied! She was innocent. I helped convict her but she didn’t do any of that. I wanted to make amends but she beat the crap out of me and I deserved it.”
The room temperature had not risen, but Bride was sweating, her forehead, upper lip, even her armpits were soaking.
“You lied? What the hell for?”
“So my mother would hold my hand!”
“What?”
“And look at me with proud eyes, for once.”
“So, did she?”
“Yes. She even liked me.”
“So you mean to tell me—”
“Shut up and talk! Why did you walk out on me?”
“Oh, God.” Booker wiped more blood from the side of his face. “Look. Well, see. My brother, he was murdered by a freak, a predator like the one I thought you were forgiving and—”
“I don’t care! I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me who killed your brother.”
“All right! All right! I get that, but—”
“But nothing! I was trying to make up to someone I ruined. You just ran around blaming everybody. You bastard. Here, wipe your bloody hand.” Bride threw a dish towel toward him and put down what was left of the bottle. After wiping her palms on her jeans and brushing hair from her damp forehead, she looked steadily at Booker. “You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.” She sat down in a chair by the table and crossed her legs.
In a long silence cut only by the sound of their breathing, they stared not at each other but away — at the floor, their hands, through the window. Minutes passed.
At last Booker felt he had something definitive and vital to say, to explain, but when he opened his mouth his tongue froze — the words were not there. No matter. Bride was asleep in the chair, her chin pointing toward her chest, her long legs splayed.
—
Queen didn’t knock; she simply opened the door to Booker’s trailer and stepped in. When she saw Bride sprawled asleep in a chair and the bruise over Booker’s eye she said, “Good Lord. What happened?”
“Dustup,” said Booker.
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah. Knocked herself out and fell asleep.”
“Some ‘dustup.’ She came all this way to beat you up? For what? Love or misery?”
“Both, probably.”
“Well, let’s get her out of that chair and on the bed,” said Queen.
“Right.” Booker stood up. With Queen’s help and his one working arm they got her on his narrow, unmade bed. Bride moaned, but did not wake.