They roared out of the parking lot into the night, raindrops on the windshield, puddles on the road that he shot through.
“Are you going to kill me, too?” she asked in that baby-talk French.
“Non.”
“What will you do?”
“As long as you’re carrying my baby,” Jimmy said, “I’ll take care of you. After that, you’re on your own, lady.”
She shook her head violently, either not understanding or not wanting to understand.
“We’re going to America,” he said. “South Dakota. You can live with me and my mom until the baby comes. Then to hell with you. You can come back here, or get a job in a whorehouse in Deadwood… I don’t care. I don’t want my baby born here or to be with you in this place I don’t understand.”
“Jimmy, no…” she whined.
“I’ve got two tickets for a flight tomorrow from Charles de Gaulle. We can go to your house and you can pack tonight.”
“I’m not leaving,” she said defiantly.
“Sure you are.”
“No!”
He would have backhanded her pretty mouth if she wasn’t with child. His child.
“So old Marcel decided to start paying attention to you, huh? Is that what this was about?”
She clammed up and stared out the window.
“You don’t understand my English?”
She refused to answer him.
“You got pregnant so you could show him, huh? And not just any kind of baby, either. A child of nature, to show what a rebel, what a free spirit you are. Was that it?”
He realized that in his rage he had taken several turns and exits and was now on a secondary highway. He saw a sign for Champs-sur-Marne, another for Lagny-sur-Marne.
“I don’t know where we are,” he said.
“The baby,” she said, “we got rid of it.”
He didn’t react. Kept driving, increasing his speed, trying to pretend he didn’t hear what she’d said. Hoping he had heard her wrong.
“Jimmy,” she said, “the baby is gone.”
“So that’s why he bought you this,” Jimmy said calmly, dead calm, caressing the dashboard of the new car, “and the jewelry. You made a deal with him, then?”
“A deal?” she said, curling her lip.
“Boy or girl?”
“Oh, Jimmy, no…”
“Boy or girl?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then: “It was for the best.”
“My son might not agree,” Jimmy said.
Sophie seemed to be burrowing into the passenger door, keeping as far away from him as she could. Her eyes were on him, cautious, scared, waiting to see what he did.
“Jimmy, don’t be angry,” she said.
“I’m not angry,” he said, a cold tumor growing exponentially in his chest. “I understand. I come from a broken nation, too, the Lakota nation. That’s what we have in common, Sophie, the only thing. We’re both on the wrong side of history. The only difference is you can’t see it.”
“You’re scaring me, Jimmy.” She pronounced it Jee-mee.
He looked over at her and laughed bitterly. “I’m scaring you?”
She screamed, “You must turn around, Jimmy! Jimmy!” Jee-mee! JEE-MEE!
He read the sign as he they passed it: Clichy-sous-Bois. No Man’s Land. She had seen it, too, screamed again for him to turn around.
But too late. Stunted trees gave way to low-slung buildings on both sides, broken windows, Arabic graffiti on the plaster walls illuminated by the flames of burning cars.
Jimmy hit the brakes and swung around the charred skeleton of a tiny car, clipping it with a fender, slowed down before he plowed into a large group of people in the middle of the street who had appeared from nowhere.
“Don’t stop,” she screamed. “Go!”
He stopped as the group closed in around the car, the white Citroën with the now-damaged fender. He saw dark faces in the undulating firelight, second-generation Arab faces, men and boys of the night in a suburb the police wouldn’t even enter, the men dressed in the same kind of grunge clothes the college demonstrators had worn, probably their hand-me-downs.
The car began to rock. Sophie screamed. A back window smashed in, spraying glass across the seat and floor. Someone kicked the passenger door. Gobs of spittle hit the windshield.
“JIMMEE! JIMMEE!” she screamed. “Go! Drive!”
Instead, he hit the button that unlocked the doors.
“They don’t want me,” he said to her as they opened the door, dragged her out, brown hands gripping her white arms. She kicked out, threw a spike-heeled shoe that landed on the dashboard.
He said, “It’s for the best,” and eased away, the crowd parting to let him go, and was soon clear of them. He couldn’t see her clearly in his rearview mirror, but thought she was on the street on her back, surrounded, kicking up at them.
Kept his head down as he drove through Clichy-sous-Bois, wipers smearing the spit into rainbow arcs across the glass, driving fast enough that most of the thrown bricks missed him. He thought he heard a gunshot as he turned a corner, but couldn’t tell if the bullet had been aimed at him.
And somehow made it through to Livry-Gargan and the N3, which would take him to Paris. He parked well short of the exit, at a bus stop, wiped his prints off the steering wheel and gearshift, and left the car with the keys in it, doubting it would make it through the night.
Jimmy Two Bulls drank coffee with a trembling hand at a twenty-four-hour roadside restaurant and gas station near the exit to the N3. It took over an hour for his breath to come normally and not in shallow gasps. He tried to eat but couldn’t. The black tumor inside him had stopped growing but was still there. He doubted it would ever leave.
He’d never know his son, but he now knew why the boy asked who his mother was. Jimmy couldn’t answer the question in the dream, and couldn’t answer it now. He had no fucking idea who she was.
They didn’t bury aborted babies, did they? He doubted it. Probably burned them with the other medical waste in a clinical incinerator, the flames no different than the fire of a burning car.
There was a tap on his shoulder.
“Parlez-vous français?”
He turned. She was in her thirties, attractive, blond. It was obvious she’d been drinking, the way her eyes sparkled. Her girlfriend sat in a booth watching the exchange, a wolfish expression on her face. A pair of straw cowboy hats sat on the table between them — they’d been to the Wild West Show. Gotten all heated up, he guessed.
“Ni glasses toki ye he?” Jimmy said in Lakota. “Ni TV Guide toki ya he?”
She was obviously thrilled. He knew he could go home with them. Instead, he tossed one of the plane tickets in a trash can outside the door.
No, he explained with hand signals, he didn’t want to go home with them. He wanted to go to the airport. He held out his arms so they looked like airplane wings. They agreed, reluctantly, to take him there, obviously disappointed.
Although they were talking over each other to him in French and he found himself recognizing a few of the words, his eyes were to the east, toward the dark maw of Clichy-sous-Bois, lit only by isolated fires, wondering how long it would take the flames to reach those who remained.
Blood Knot
Fourteen-year-old Hattie Sykes was awake when her grandfather cracked the bedroom door ajar and said, “Ready to hit the river?”