Terrorist

bottom and tiie fancy ticking; the thought constricts his throat. Everything about her seems to gleam-her hot-pink lipstick, her short hair moussed up into little points like porcupine quills, the gold sparkles sprinkled in the grease around her eyes. She says, to fill his silence, 'Those were easy times, compared to nowadays and its job market.'

'Why doesn't Tylenol get a job for this money he wants?'

'He thinks too big for any old job. He has plans to be a big man some day and meanwhile asks me to put a little bread on the table. He doesn't ax me to work the street, just oblige somebody now and then, usually some white man. When we're fixed up and settled down he's gone to treat me like a queen, he says.' Since high school she has pierced one eyebrow for a little ring to add to the nostril-bead and the silver row of rings that looks like a caterpillar feeding on the upper curve of her ear. 'So, Ahmad. No more just standing there staring your face off. What would you like? I could give you a blow job right tbe way we are and cut down on the mess, but I think your Mr. Charlie had his heart set on your getting a real piece of ass, which involves a scumbag and a wash-up afterwards. He paid me for the full deal, depending on how it suited you. He anticipated you might be shy.'

Ahmad whimpers. 'Joryleen, I can't stand to hear you talk like this.'

'Talk like what way, Ahmad? You still have your head up there in Arab Neverland? I'm just trying to be clear. Let's get some clothes off and pick one of these beds. Boy, do we have the beds!'

'Joryleen, you keep those clothes on. I respect you the way you used to be, and anyway don't want to be devir-ginated, until a lawful marriage to a good Muslim woman, like the Qur'an says.'

'She's out there in Neverland, baby, and I'm right here and ready to take you around the world.'

'What does that mean, 'take you around the world'?'

'I can show you. You don't even have to take off that faggy white shirt, just your black pants. Those are evil tight pants of yours; they used to get me to creaming.'

And, her face at the level of his fly, Joryleen opens her lips, not as wide as when she used to sing, but wide enough so he can see in. The moist inner membranes and gums gleam at the base of her teeth, the perfect pearly arc of diem, with the fat pale tongue behind. The whites of her eyes enlarge as she looks a question up into his face.

'Don't you be disgusting,' he says, though the flesh behind his fly has responded.

Joryleen turns pettish, teasing. 'You want me to have to return tire money your Mr. Charlie gave? You want Tylenol to beat the shit out of me?'

'Is that what he does?'

'He tries not to mark me up. The older pimps tell him you're just spiting your own self when you do that.' She stops looking up at him and gently butts him below his belt, twisting her head there like a dog drying off. She looks up again. 'Come on, you pretty thing. You like me, I can see you do.' With both sets of long-nailed fingertips she touches the bulge behind his fly.

He jumps back, alarmed less by Joryleen's caress than by the devil of assent and submission rising within him, stiffening one part of his body and causing a dazed relaxation elsewhere, as if his blood has been injected with a thickening substance; she has roused a sugary reality within him, that of a man coming into his own in the service of the seed he carries. Women are his fields, on couches with linings of brocade shall they recline, and the fruit of the two gardens shall be within easy reach. He tells Joryleen, 'I like you too well to treat you like some whore.'

But she is in a crooning mood, amused and challenged by her balky customer. 'Just let me take him into my mouth,' she says. 'That's no sin in the old Koran. That's just natural affection. We're made for it, Ahmad. And we won't stay made forever. We get old, we get sick. Be your plain self with me for an hour, and you'll be doing us both a favor. Wouldn't you like to play with my nice big tits? I see you looking down my blouse every time we got close at school.'

He holds himself back from her, his calves pressing against the mattress of the next bare bed, but is too dazed by the storm in his blood to protest when in a zigzag set of gestures she tugs her close-fitting top out of her little skirt, pulls it up over her blotchily bleached head of short hair, and, arching her back, uncouples her webby black bra. The brown of her breasts is dark as eggplants in the circles around the meat-colored nipples. Having them there out in the air, purple and rose, looking less enormous than they seemed half concealed, makes her feel, somehow, more like the old friendly Joryleen he used to, slightly, know, her smile both cocky and tentative out by the lockers.

He says, with a thick tongue and dry throat, 'I don't want you telling Tylenol what we did and didn't do.'

'O.K., I won't, I promise. He doesn't like to hear what I do with the tricks anyway.'

'I want you to take off the rest of your clothes and we'll just lie together a while and talk.'

That he has taken even this much initiative seems to subdue her. She crosses her legs and takes off one pointy white boot and then the other and stands, the top of her spiky blond-spotted head no higher, now that she is barefoot, than the base of Ahmad's throat. Joryleen bumps against his chest, balancing on one leg and now the other, to pull down her red vinyl skirt and filmy black underpants. This done, she keeps her chin and eyelids lowered, waiting, crossing her arms in front of her breasts as if nudity makes her more modest.

He stands back and says, 'Little Miss Popular,' marvelling at the real, bare, vulnerable Joryleen. 'We'll leave my clothes on,' he tells her. 'Let me see what I can find for a blanket and some pillows.'

'It's pretty hot and stuffy up here,' she says. 'I'm not sure we need a blanket.'

'A blanket under us,' he explains. 'To protect the mattress. You know what a good mattress costs?' Most are protected in thick plastic, but tJiat would make an unpleasant, skin-adhesive surface to lie down on.

'Hey, let's move this show along,' she complains. 'I'm all undressed-suppose somebody comes up?'

'I'm surprised you care,' he says, 'if you turn all those tricks.' He has taken on a responsibility, to create a bower for him and a mate; the sensation excites him but makes him anxious. Turning at the head of the stairs, he sees her, sitting calmly in the lamplight, light anotlier cigarette, and the smoke make that rippling structure in the conical glow. He runs downstairs, rapidly so she won't evaporate. Amid the furniture in the main showroom he finds no blankets, but he takes two patterned pillows from a chenille-covered sofa and carries up along with them a small Oriental rug, four by six. These hurried tasks cool him off a little, but his legs still tremble.

' 'Bout time,' she greets him. He arranges the pillows and rug on the mattress, and she stretches herself out on the rug's intertwining pattern, bordered in blue-the traditional image, Habib Chehab has explained to him, of an oasis garden, encircled by a river. Joryleen, one arm cocked behind her head on the chenille pillow, exposes a shaved armpit. 'Man, this is kinky,' she says as he lies down, shoeless but otherwise clothed, beside her.

His shirt will get wrinkled, but he figures this is part of what this will cost him. 'Can I put my arm around you?' he asks.

'Oh, Christ, sure. You're entitled to a lot more than tliat.'

'Just this,' he tells her, 'is as much as I can stand.'

'O.K. Ahmad: now, you relax.'

'I don't want to do anytliing mat strikes you as repulsive.'

This makes her smile, and then laugh, so he feels her expressed breath warm on the side of his neck. 'That would be harder than you'd like to know.'

'Why do you do it? Let Tylenol send you out like this.'

She sighs, again a gust of life on his neck. 'You don't know much yet about love. He's my man. Without me, he doesn't have much. He'd be pathetic, and maybe I love him too much for him to know that. For a black man grown up poor in New Prospect, having a woman to peddle around is no disgrace-it's a way to prove your manhood.'

'Yeah, but what are^ow getting to prove?'

'That I can deal with shit, I guess. It's just for a while. I don't do drugs, that's how the girls get hooked, they do the drugs so they can stand die shit, and then the habit becomes the main shit. All I'll do is grass, and a puff of crack now and then; nobody's breakin' into my veins. I can walk away, when circumstances change.'

'Joryleen: how would tliey change?'

She offers, 'He gets set up with some other connection. Or I say I won't do it any more.'

'I don't think he will let you go easily now. You yourself say you're all he has.'

She confesses the truth of diis with her silence, a silence that adds a density to her body under his arm. Lightly she presses her belly against his, and her breasts are like sponges of warm water held at the level of his shirt pocket, deepening the wrinkles. At a far reach of him, her toenails- painted plain red, he noticed when she took off