crumpled wrapper back into the can.
“I’m goin’ to bed, girl. It’s late!”
She appraised him for a moment, then smiled. “You fucked up!”
He laughed, like a little boy caught in some foolishness.
She saw the bag he still clutched in his hand. “I ain’t had nothing to eat, ’Trane. I’m
He held the bag aloft, like the head of a slain enemy. “I got some food for ya right here.”
She held out a hand and offered him her best smile. It lit up all that alcohol in him. It set him on fire. “Well, give it over then,” she said.
“You must think I’m crazy. Come on back with me, to my place.”
“Shit. That old cab?”
Beltrane turned and walked in that direction, listening to her footsteps as she trotted to catch up. The booze in him caused the earth to move in slow, steady waves, and the lights to bleed into the cloudy night. A cold wind had kicked up, and the buildings swooned on their foundations. Together they trekked the short distance to United Cab.
He found himself, as always, stealing glances at her: Though she was gaunt from deprivation, she seemed to have an aura of carved nobility about her, a hard beauty distinct from circumstance or prospect. She was young enough, too, that she still harbored some resilient optimism about the world, as though it may yet yield some good for her.
The first hard drops of rain fell as they reached the cab. It had died where it was last parked, two years ago. It sagged earthward, its tires long deflated and its shocks long spent, so that the chassis nearly scraped the ground as Beltrane opened the door and climbed in. It smelled like fried food and sweat, and he rubbed the old air freshener hanging from the rearview in some wild hope he could coax a little life from it yet. The front seats had been taken out, giving them room to stretch their legs. The car was packed with blankets, old newspapers, and skin magazines. Ivy stared in after him, wrinkling her nose.
“This is it, baby,” he said.
“It stinks in here!”
“It ain’t that bad. You get used to it.”
He leaned against the seat back, stretching his legs to the front. He hooked one arm up over the backseat and invited her to lean into him. She paused, still halfway through the door on her hands and knees.
“I ain’t fuckin’ you, ’Trane. You too damn old.”
“Shit, girl.” He tried to pretend he wasn’t disappointed. “Get your silly ass in here and have some food.”
She climbed in and he opened the bag for her. The shrimp retained a lingering heat from the microwave at the pub, and they dug in. Afterward, with warm food alight in their bellies and the rain hammering on the roof, she eased back against the seat and settled into the crook of his arm at last, resting her head on his shoulder. Beltrane gave her a light squeeze, realizing with a kind of dismay that any sexual urge had left him, that the feeling he harbored for her now was something altogether different, altogether better.
“I don’t know nothing about you, ’Trane,” she said quietly. “You don’t talk very much.”
“What you mean? I’m always talking!”
“Yeah but you don’t really
“Well,” he said, his voice trailing. “Somewhere. I got a little girl somewhere.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “For real?”
He just nodded. Something about this conversation felt wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The rain was coming down so hard it was difficult to focus. “I ain’t seen her in a long time. She got married and went away.”
“She just abandon you? That’s fucked up, ’Trane.”
“I wasn’t like this then. Things was different.” Sorrow crested and broke in his chest. “She got to live her life. She had to go.”
“You ever think about leaving, too? Maybe you could go to where she live.”
“Hell no, girl. This is my home. This is everything I know.”
“It’s just a place, ’Trane. You can change a place easy.”
He didn’t want to think about that. “Anyway,” he said, “she forgot me by now.”
Ivy was quiet for a time, and Beltrane let himself be lulled by the drumbeat over their heads. Then she said, “I bet she ain’t forgot you.” She adjusted her position to get comfortable, putting her head back on his shoulder. “I bet she still love her daddy.”
They stopped talking, and eventually she drifted off to sleep. He kissed her gently on her forehead, listening to the storm surrounding the car. The air was chilly, but their bodies were warm against each other. Outside was thrashing darkness and rain.
She’d blinked tears from her eyes.
Beltrane awoke with a fearful convulsion. The car was filling with water. It was pouring from Ivy, from her eyes and her mouth, from the pores of her skin, in a black torrent, lifting the stored papers and the garbage around them in swirling eddies, rising rapidly over their legs and on up to their waists. The water was appallingly cold; he lost all feeling where it covered him. He put his hands over Ivy’s face to staunch the flow, without effect. Her head lolled beside him, her face discolored and grotesquely swollen.
He was going to drown. The idea came to him with a kind of alien majesty; he was overcome with awe and horror.
He pushed against the car door, but it wouldn’t open. Beyond the window, the night moved with a murderous will. It lifted the city by its roots and shook it in its teeth. The water had nearly reached the ceiling, and he had to arch his back painfully to keep his face above it. Ivy had already slipped beneath the surface, her lamp-lit eyes shining like cave fish.
All thought left him: His whole energy was channeled into a scrabbling need to escape. He slammed his body repeatedly into the car door. He pounded the glass with his fists.
Beltrane awakens to pain. His limbs are wracked with it, his elbow especially. He opens his eyes and sees the pavement of the alley. Climbing to his feet takes several minutes. Morning is near: Through the mouth of the alley the streetlights glow dimly against a sky breaking slowly into light. There is no traffic, and the salty smell of the bay is strong. The earth has cooled in the night, and the heat’s return is still a few hours away.
He takes a step toward the street, then stops, sensing something behind him. He turns around.
A small city has sprouted from the ground in the night, where he’d been sleeping, surrounded by blowing detritus and stagnant filth. It spreads across the puddle-strewn pavement and grows up the side of the wall, twinkling in the deep blue hours of the morning, like some gorgeous fungus, awash in a blustery evening rain. It exudes a sweet, necrotic stink. He’s transfixed by it, and the distant wails he hears rising from it are a brutal, beautiful lullaby.
He walks away from it.
When he gets to the street, he turns left, heading down to the small harbor. The door to the church is closed when he passes it, and the lights are off inside. There’s no indication of any life there. Soon he passes the shelter, and there are people he recognizes socializing by its front door, but he doesn’t know their names, and they don’t know his. They don’t acknowledge him as he walks by. He passes a little restaurant, the smell of coffee and griddle-cooked sausage hanging in front of it like a cloud. The long white masts of the sailboats are peering over the tops of buildings. He rounds a corner and he is there.
The water of the bay glimmers with bright shards of light as the sun climbs. The boats jostle gently in their berths. A pelican perches on a short pier, wings spread like hanging laundry. He follows a sidewalk along the waterfront until he finds a pay phone with a dial tone. He presses zero and waits.
