Kiki took off her sweater and got barefoot. She sat there letting the dry steam heat sink into her shoulders and feet. Then she unbuttoned her blouse, draping it over the pile of sweater and shoes. In the mirror she could follow the lines of freckles across her chest. She caressed her shoulders lightly with her fingers grazing the skin. She was happy, almost stupid with the heat.
The face in the mirror belonged to the same girl who lived in a shotgun shack next to Nigger Town in Hogston, Arkansas. That was before her daddy made it rich. They had a Plunkett water heater on the back porch. She’d go back there with Riley Mathias and Brewster Collins and lay up against the tank with a day blanket and oranges stolen from Aunt Katherine’s basket...
If her parents were out she’d give the boys kisses for nickels; but it cost a quarter if they wanted some tongue. If it was just Brewster, sometimes she wouldn’t even collect, just let him owe her for someday when she was broke.
She closed her eyes, remembering one rainy day when Riley ran home because he didn’t want to get wet. It was summer and still hot in spite of the rain. Kiki and Brewster didn’t mind, though. They played in the rain until they were soaked to the bone and then they crawled up next to the water heater. She let him steal lip kisses and even stuck out her tongue now and then.
The gas jet through the grating was blowing blue flame. Their clothes made soft sucking sounds which Kiki associated with sex. Katherine hacked on and off from the couch at the front of the house, but they didn’t worry that she’d find them; Katherine was too sick by then to get around on her own.
“Bite me right here, Brewster.” Kiki had pulled up her calf-length plaid skirt to reveal her skinny right thigh. “Bite me or I’ll never be your friend again.”
She closed her eyes so that all she knew was the clamping teeth on her skin.
“Harder... harder.”
She put her hand on Brewster’s head and patted it just like he was her dog.
“Harder, li’l boy,” she said.
When the pain got to be too much she counted up to ten and then said, “Okay, stop! Right now! Stop it!” And she hit Brewster on his neck and on both sides of his head.
Later on she made him look at the dark bruise he’d caused. She put his fingers on the hot lump it made. Brewster’s light blue eyes turned into lanterns of fear.
“If I ever show my daddy, you’re dead, Brewster.”
Loud knocking made her open her eyes on the emaciated image in the mirror.
“Are you okay, miss?” somebody asked through the door.
“Just a minute.”
Kiki shoved the blouse and socks into the hospital bag and turned the light gray sweater inside out, tearing the tag from the back. Then she put the sweater back on, threw water in her face, and smiled her fierce tiger-smile into the water-stained mirror.
Randy was selling his magazines from a small folding table on St. Mark’s Place. He had Stroke and Vixens splayed out in a double fan shape and a box full of back-issue X-Men and Spider-Man comic books on the side.
“Kiki! Where’ve you been? I called every day last week.” Randy came around the table, pushing his long stringy dreadlocks back over his shoulder.
“I got stabbed,” she said, putting her hand up to ward off his touch.
“What?”
“Goddamn little niggers all over this woman on Chrystie. You know? Prob’ly a schoolteacher. I don’t know what she was, because she ran after they stuck me.”
“What happened?” The concern on Randy’s face accented his hybrid features. The broad nose and sad gray eyes. He had a long and angular face, like the Swedish actor Max von Sydow. His eggshell-brown skin and twiny dreadlocks marked him as a Negro, but Randy had a tight walk and way of talking that Kiki associated with northern whites.
He’d once taken her to a room over the Chinese laundry. She asked to see where he kept all the magazines and then they were on the little cot in the corner. She still couldn’t inhale the odor of old magazines without thinking of that peculiar bony weight on her chest and the shock of Randy’s small black cock buried in thickly coiled pubic hair.
“You surprised?” he’d asked with a wide grin.
“Yeah,” Kiki said as she grabbed the thing and squeezed it.
“Uh... big, huh?”
“Ain’t so big really, but it sure is black.”
Even now, on the cold streets, she remembered how sweet he was. The memory bringing that jagged ripping feeling inside.
“They were messing with her,” Kiki said. “And I came up, you know, to help her. I mean, they were just kids. But this one boy, this one boy...” The boys were all over the schoolteacher, pushing at her and grabbing at her bag. The fool was playing scared, and those boys, those boys were on her like flies on shit. They were little boys. Some of them seven or eight and not one over ten. But there were lots of them. Nine maybe. Then the teacher started to scream. Kiki tried to protect her from the little attackers, but there was this hard-faced little boy. He hated Kiki. He screamed and it would have been funny if she hadn’t seen the knife. He swung once and Kiki slapped his face in return, but weakly, and then he did it again and again. She was on her knees. Somebody was screaming.
“Kiki! Kiki!” Randy shouted. He was shaking her. “What’s wrong, honey? Oh shit. You’re bleeding.”
Kiki looked down to see the spots of blood that had stained the inside of her sweater.
“I was on my knees,” she said to some point beyond Randy’s eyes. “But I stood up to him. He mighta killed me, but I wasn’t scared.” She shook her head slowly — denying the pain of any blow that she’d ever been dealt. “I’m not really bleedin’. They got these tubes comin’ out to drain it. It’s not too bad.”
When Kiki realized that Randy was holding her she pulled away.
“I gotta go home, I’m really dead,” she said.
“Hold up a minute, sugar,” Randy said, not letting her go. “Hey! Man-well, Man-well.”
A small Puerto Rican man selling art books a few feet down turned to look.
“Watch my stuff for half an hour?”
The pock-faced little man nodded.
“I don’t need your help.” Kiki heard her father’s voice in hers — slurred and lopsided like when he’d been at the Thunderbird and they were all locked in for the night.
She tried to pull away, but Randy just held on and began to walk. They went down St. Mark’s. Past the bookstore window and dozens of young women and men who sported pink spiked hairdos and safety-pinned flesh, many with peekaboo tattoos under torn clothes that exposed every possible color of skin. Past the outside game machines and the boys who played them. The wind kicked up and Kiki felt cold everywhere except her side. That was hot and cramped.
“I don’t need you to help me, Randy,” she said, but she leaned against him when he put his arm around her and she didn’t struggle when he took her bag.
He smelled of patchouli oil and sweat, of old magazines.
“I just wanna take you home, honey. That’s all.”
“You ain’t gettin’ any with the way I been butchered, so you might as well give it up.”
“You’ve been saying that for months anyway. If that’s what I was after I wouldn’t even say boo.”
“It hurts, honey,” Kiki said as she watched St. Mark’s pass by through his swinging dreadlocks.
“We’ll be there soon, Kiki.”
And they walked down to the park with its fires and shanty tents. All the people living through the cold snap in the New York spring. Down to Sixth Street and over toward the Beldin, past Avenue C.
Two
Soupspoon Wise sat out on the sidewalk in a dilapidated chair, a blanket wrapped tightly around his shoulders. He was staring up at the facade of the Beldin Arms. The bronze letters had been pried off and stolen years before. You could barely make out the words in the cracked, discolored granite arch.