corner on the way home from school and saw Jamaal’s broad back, thirty feet ahead of me. I dropped my pace so I wouldn’t overtake him, giving him cause to cut my throat, and I was so careful that I stumbled and dropped the big armload of books I was carrying. They scattered across the sidewalk with an unnerving racket and papers burst free, strewn like fall leaves, and he turned around.
Jamaal turned around.
He said nothing, silent as his viciously mum brother, and as I stooped to retrieve everything he backtracked, so I kept my gaze low, the way you do with animals who might take eye contact as a challenge. His shoes came into view and they stopped, planted firm as pedestals, and I saw a knee, then the other knee, and then the rest of him as he knelt to help me pick up the mess.
When it was done, books dusted and papers salvaged, he looked at me with long-lashed brown eyes so shy, and some worse flavor, as though he’d guessed what I’d been thinking, and he said:
“You really should have a backpack.”
So we became friends, and as we were in seventh grade we were too old to play together, so instead we just hung, but never at my house and never at his, because I suppose each of us had things at home we wanted to shield the other from.
It was inevitable that I would show him the slaughterhouse, initiate him into its secrets and decline, and we would prowl its corridors as if searching their shadows for hints of our futures and how to reach them. Or we’d look for valuables left behind and sometimes even find them: the odd dirty magazine, select pages already brittle; warm beer, cached by older kids for later.
Sometimes we would just sit, ignoring the underlying residue of death as we trusted each other with the reasons why neither of us wanted to go home for dinner, me talking about my stepbrother and what a world-class stoolie he was, and Jamaal saying he could never study for all the yelling going on, his sister nineteen, with very definite ideas of what she wanted to do in a day and who she wanted to do it with, and their father not seeing it that way at all. He already had someone in mind he expected her to marry.
“Jameel sees what’s coming for him in a few years,” Jamaal told me. “He’s next. He coughed blood last week. The doctor says it’s an ulcer.”
And when, after the tragedy, no one knew where to look for Jamaal, I was the only one who thought to check the slaughterhouse the next day, but while he’d look at me, he refused to talk, or couldn’t. I could still smell smoke on him. He didn’t resist when, after an hour, I took him by the arm and steered him out of the slaughterhouse and past the thin young trees growing where once had been a drive, and brought him out to civilization and those who said they had his best interests at heart. I was afraid he might stay back in there until he starved.
Their father never denied locking Jamaal’s sister in her room after dousing her with gasoline and setting her ablaze, claiming that where he’d grown up a father had that right, when there was nothing left to be done with a rebellious, disrespectful daughter.
The area Shriners launched a fund drive to help with the skin grafts, but I never heard how she was doing because the rest of the family moved away to live with other relatives.
“Now do you see why I never wanted you exposed to people like that?” my mother said. “Their children are just cattle to them, is all they are. Not precious like you are to us.”
So I never knew what became of Jamaal, although years later, when I was in high school and needed some cash, I was going through my mother’s dresser drawers and beneath a jewelry box found three old letters, unopened, that he’d mailed to me, and only then did I realize I never had gotten around to asking him what country his parents were from.
*
After insuring Jamey’s eternal rest, nothing much else seemed right for the day, so back at our apartment Rachel called in sick to the current temping job she had, and Mae did the same at the music store, although it was late enough by now that both places should’ve already gotten the idea, so we made coffee and drank it, and then a little later on we went to bed.
It’s hard to say why it happened, Mae feeling not much better about things, so I kissed her on the cheek, and she continued to tilt her face up, so I kissed her again but a little lower, and by the third or fourth time I was squarely at her mouth. It was one of her very best features, a size or two too large for her face if you adhered to strict proportional criteria to condone beauty, but perfection is ultimately so boring. Rachel would sometimes remark what a great mouth Mae had, so wide and dazzling when she smiled, neither lip overpowering the other when she didn’t, and always looking so moist, and when I was finding out how true this was, I felt another nose nudging in, so we made room for Rachel.
We grieved our way toward the unmade bed and sent our clothes to the floor. Sometimes I was right there and other times felt entirely apart from everything, entranced by the differences in us, in our bodies, even between two of the same gender. Our hands. Six hands hypnotic, gliding like butterflies, and our smells and tastes none the same, whether from outside our bodies or from within, and the hair so varied in color, texture, thickness. I couldn’t think of us configuring as two-and-one, more like three entirely separate creatures belonging to no particular evolution.
Everyone got a turn as the focus of attention, but all things must wind down sometime. Our
“I hope she’s not a teeth-grinder,” Rachel said. “She’ll bite my nipple off.”
“Spread your hair across the pillow more,” I told her, and she got a funny look on her face, like the time for that was past, and asked why. “Never mind, just humor me.”
So Rachel arranged, rolling her eyes and trying not to jostle Mae, until her hair fanned in chestnut waves. I repositioned her hand to caress the back of Mae’s head, with fingertips only, and she finally relaxed into the sculpting, and when I got her to give me that tiny frown the look was just so perfect.
“Lady Madonna, baby at your breast,” I said. It was the only Beatles I could remember, too. “This is a whole new image for you. Who would’ve guessed?”
Rachel glared, saying, “I
Her hands had always been subtly weird to me, the undersides at least. From fingertips to heel there was hardly any definition, her palms so smooth and flat they looked unfinished. She’d been five weeks premature, and I could imagine some telepathy between her and my mother going on even then, Rachel telling herself in a watery prenatal voice,
“Look at her.” Rachel raised the covers and we peered down Mae’s length, between us. “The way her body’s so straight, hardly any curves or angles to it. It’s not unfeminine, but it’s almost like a boy’s.”
“Well, looking at you, that’s all just relative.”
“Maybe she appeals to the latent queer in you, you think?”
“I didn’t realize we’d ever established I have one, did we?”
“If you say so,” Rachel shrugged. “But I’d say this afternoon we established that I sure did.”
“Oh come on. You had to know. You’ve kissed girls before.”
“Kissed, yeah. But this is the first time I’ve ever had one squatting on my face.”
“Well then, progress has been made.”
“I feel so … needed,” Rachel said. “How can I feel so much older than her when we’re just two years apart, that doesn’t make any sense.” She looked down at Mae’s mouth. “Can we keep her?”
I figured Rachel was kidding but gave it some thought the way you’ll preview lives you’ll never live or people you’ll never kill even when they deserve it, then realized she was serious.
“She doesn’t own much,” I said, “so I guess there’d be room.”
Rachel shook Mae’s shoulder, saying, “Okay, come on now, the bar’s closed,” pulling her nipple from Mae’s mouth, and when Mae was awake and smiling with fuck languor, Rachel said, “Um, I need to ask you something, but it’s personal.”
