She lit another cigarette for me. I could have done if for myself by then, but what the hell. We had to get moving-the Plymouth was as anonymous a car as you could want, but Flood and I hadn’t made any friends in the last few hours and you never know. “Where to?” I asked her.
“I think you should come with me,” she said, “I have the information you want, but I can only show it to you where I live.” I nodded and she gave me directions. She knew the city better than I expected.
It was an old factory building on Tenth Avenue, south of Twenty-third. The sign over the entrance said
Flood had a key and we took the freight elevator to the fourth floor. A small hand-lettered sign proclaimed this the Yoga Plateau, and Flood produced another key. Inside was a huge empty room, gym mats on the floor, plain white walls, stereo set in one corner, and speakers all over the place. One whole wall was industrial windows. A sprinkler system hung down from the ceiling, pipes all painted white. There was a tiny white plastic desk and white push-button phone. Even the bulletin boards were white. In the middle of the linoleum floor was a large square marked off with wide black industrial tape. Flood walked toward the square, then veered off to the side. I stepped into the square, and was stepping back out of it even as Flood shook her head no. She headed toward a door against the side wall away from the windows. She had the key for that one too. I followed her inside.
We were in a tiny private apartment. The stove had a large wok covering the only two burners; the waist-high refrigerator had a white wood cabinet on top; and there was a chest of drawers with an armoire standing next to it, both painted white. Through an open door, I saw a stall shower, sink, and toilet. The room next to the little kitchen had rattan mats on the floor, probably for sleeping. There was no other furniture.
Flood left the door open behind us. She tossed her purse on top of the chest, shrugged out of her jacket, spread her hand to indicate I should sit on the floor. I looked carefully around the little room-no ashtrays. She caught my eye, took a small red-glazed bowl from next to the sink and handed it to me. “Use this.”
I sat and smoked through a couple of cigarettes while Flood busied herself around the place. She asked me if I wanted tea, and seemed unsurprised when I said no. Finally, she came over to me and sat across from me in the lotus position.
“Mr. Burke, I have to explain some things to you. And I have to show you some things so you’ll understand why I have to find this person who calls himself the Cobra. Let me just tell you in my own way and when I’m finished you can ask any questions that you like.” I nodded okay, and Flood rose to her feet without using her hands, like mist coming off the ground. Standing about five feet from me, she reached down and took off her shoes, one at a time. She was wearing slacks of some kind of dark silky material-the legs were wide and loose, but tightly fitted from her upper thighs to her waist. A dark jersey top was so snug it had to be a bodysuit. She had the traditional hourglass shape, all right, but hers was so densely packed that she looked powerful and beautiful all at the same time.
She did something at her waist, and the silky pants floated to the floor. I was right-it was a bodysuit underneath. She stepped away from the shiny puddle at her feet, bent in half at the waist and I heard the snaps pop on the bodysuit. She pulled the suit over her head in one motion and tossed it gently on top of her pants. Her bra and panties were of some smooth material that matched; the combination looked more like a fairly modest bathing suit than underwear. She hooked her thumbs inside the waistband of the pants and slid them down and off, one leg at a time. I just sat there watching, not smoking now. She stood there for a moment, hands on hips, staring down at me. She looked like a lot of things to me then, but vulnerable wasn’t any of them. She turned slowly to her right, half her back on the left side coming into view. Even her rump looked like muscle covered with pale skin. I heard my own breathing.
She kept turning until she was facing completely away from me, and then I saw it-halfway down the right cheek and partway down her thigh was a dark red stain-the skin under the stain was raised and rough. I knew what it was instantly-fire scars. She bent forward slightly as if to show me the whole thing, then turned back until she was facing me again. She walked over until she was right in front of my face and turned again. The scar was ragged and uneven as though she had sat down in a fireplace-not a surgeon’s work. Maybe skin grafts would have worked years ago, but it clearly was too late now. When she turned again to look at me, I nodded to show I understood what it was. She walked away from me toward the bathroom. The scars didn’t affect the muscles underneath. She walked with that independent, up-and-down movement of her cheeks that even most strippers never get right. I sat there looking at the puddle of her discarded clothes and heard the hiss of spray. She didn’t sing in the shower.
She came out in a few minutes wearing a yellow terrycloth robe, gathered the pile of clothes from the floor and threw them in a large wicker basket near the dresser. Then she came over and sat down next to me. It was dark in her place, but the white walls from the studio bounced enough light inside for me to see her face. I lit another cigarette and she began to talk.
“I don’t remember much about my mother, but I know I was taken away from her when I was just a little kid. I lived in foster homes at first, but then they put me in an institution when the family that had me moved out of the state. When I was fourteen, they found another foster home for me, and they let me out to go live there. The man in that home raped me. I told the social workers and they asked him about it. He said that we had sex, but that I had come on to him and he couldn’t help himself. He went into therapy, I went into a home for girls. I ran away and they caught me. I kept running away. I always got caught after a while, and they’d put me in an empty room with nothing in it, not even a book to read. The social workers told me it was all right to be sad, but not to be angry. It wasn’t healthy.”
She took a deep breath. “I had a friend, my best and greatest friend ever. Her name was Sadie. Her mother was Jewish and her father was black. She was so smart. She told me she wouldn’t have ever been put in the institution except that she wasn’t fashionable. I never understood that, at first. But she was my friend. We did everything together. We always shared. Everything. We fought the bull dykes together and the matrons too. I didn’t know how to fight then, but I was strong and I was always angry. Sadie couldn’t fight at all but she always tried. Once they put us in the Quiet Room for two weeks together and it only made us closer-better than sisters, because
An expression I couldn’t read flashed across her face and she went on, “We went with him and he was nice at first. But that same night, he brought in some other men from his pack. They told us to take off our clothes and dance for them. We wouldn’t. I could have gotten away, but I fought them with Sadie. I broke a bottle and cut one of them in the face. They beat us, badly. When I woke up, there was an old man there with a suitcase. He was arguing with the pack. He said something about how he couldn’t do it-we were too young. One of the pack came over to us and said he was sorry for what the others had done. He said the man was a doctor and he’d fix us up. He gave us each something to drink. I don’t remember anything except reaching for Sadie before I passed out.
“When I came to, I saw Sadie lying next to me. We still had no clothes on and Sadie was bleeding between her legs. I checked, but I wasn’t. My whole face was swollen so bad I could hardly talk. I think it was another day or so before we both really woke up. There was a dirty bandage on my hip, one on Sadie’s too. I thought it was maybe where the doctor gave us a shot, but it was a big bandage. I crawled out into the hall. The pack was all asleep in the next room. It was like a cave of devils-filthy and smelly. Sadie and I found some clothes and we made it down the stairs. A policeman found us, and took us to a place for runaways because Sadie told him we were sisters from Ohio. She was smart-I couldn’t think of anything to say. When they took the bandages off in the runaway place to give us showers, we saw what they had done, why they brought the old man up there. We each had a tattoo on our bottoms. Just the name of that pack, but a real tattoo. When I saw it on Sadie, I cried for the first time in years. She cried too. The nurse at the runaway place told us that they were permanent-they would never come off. When they left Sadie and me alone, we talked-and we decided what we had to do. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t care anymore after what they did to us.
“Sadie and I just walked out of the runaway place. They didn’t even try to stop us. Sadie panhandled in the Village until we got some money, then we bought four of those five-gallon cans and went to a gas station and filled them up. We just sat outside that building where the pack was until it was late at night and then we went upstairs. The pack was all zonked out on booze and dope. It was easy. Sadie and I knew what would happen to us, but it didn’t matter. We poured the gasoline all over the place-all over those sleeping devils. Then we each lit matches and threw them into the gas. We didn’t even run out of the building, just walked away. They screamed a lot-I wish I
