The Deadheart Shelters (3 page)

Then I lay chained by the foot to the metal, wishing I could be close enough to touch Lilly (but we don’t get to pick where we sleep). It was a night when I’d been talking about something and when I stopped I realized nobody else was awake. The snores Abe made were the way a knife scratches words into wood, incessant. I started to think, “What would it be like to hear only your own breath?”

I shook him up. “Hey, Abe. I’m gonna do it.”

“Do what? Come on, Pete, let a man catch some rest when rest is available to him. It ain’t always, you know—”

“I’m gonna leave.”

He sat up with his eyes half-squinted but a tired smile also. “You are? Well that’s great, Pete, that’s really—”

“But I don’t know how to get the chain off.”

He stared at the chain through the dark. “How important is a foot to you?”

“What?”

“No, never mind, we got nothing’ to cut it off with.”

“I’m not lookin’ to lose my shit here, Abe—”

“You might,” Abe said. “You might.” He lay back down and less than a dozen seconds later, the sound of wood carvings. Soon I went to sleep too.

In the streets I’d stay close in front of the big dog because we were underdressed for the morning’s cold and the steam he’d breathe out would warm you like an exhaust pipe. If the conversations we had at night were xylophones we spent the slow evening sealing them in body bags and woke automatically and without speech. It often happened that someone we passed would spit or shove one of us off-balance and I remember the time that Dante tried to push back.

Dante had a habit of holding his head up and looking not at the things in front of him but the things above that. He said the sky was filled with penguins and icebergs and sometimes it could have other things in it. If we had the prolonged privacy to talk he’d describe them. A herd of black elephants impaling the sun with tusks as clean as baby teeth, the sun like a deflating balloon with grapefruits coughed out in the deflation. He said the sky is much more beautiful like this, covered in pulp and water, and that the elephants were happy. “The problem with my head is I can’t see it myself. My eyes point the other direction, so I make the sky my head.”

He was on the sidewalk, floating in this sky-headed space, when a man passing pushed him down, shouting, “If I have to see a
chalko
in my own damn city his eyes better be hidden.”

Dante sprang back to his feet, taking two steps backwards like a VCR rewound and grabbed the man by the collar, throwing him down harder. He got on top of him deliberately like a jockey mounts a horse and started hitting him over and over in the face. The dogs immediately upon him and the man’s screams like fire truck alarms until his jaw dislocated, and then they sounded like sleep talk. The dogs exposing the bone in Dante’s body. Nothing could stop him until the man’s face was pressed flat like a rotten pomegranate and the skull stuck out in the shape of a starfish. Then it was easier for the dogs to stop him and they didn’t leave him alone until Dante’s face looked the same.

None of us stopped walking that day, none of us stop walking now. I saw two lovers holding each other’s hands stiffly, in a way that says It could be anybody else’s hand I’m holding. The city ended in a disjointed and confused way, like it had never been finished. Scabs of asphalt over marsh with automobiles half-sunk into it from drivers who stopped paying attention to the road as it came apart. And beyond the marsh that covered our shoes, we came to the field beside an old barn nobody used anymore, where we were supposed to pull all the weeds.

Over miles; every weed; our hands started to get raw. We were used to this and our hands got tough, but sometimes even the calluses broke. This was one of those jobs.

“I’m so tired, Pete,” Lilly said. My hands were cracked so every weed I touched got tinted with the darkness of my blood, but I didn’t mind. It was one of those rare jobs where we could wander, and naturally I wandered beside her. I only nodded.

“Some have the luxury of sleep in response to the body’s asking. But we have to neglect that. We have to neglect a lot.”

“I know,” I said.

“Do you want to run away?”

“Run away? Forever?”

She looked around, and I could tell she was biting her cheeks inside her mouth. She had a way of doing that. The big dog was on his haunches in front of the barn, and the two little dogs that had also come were like trees dotting a faraway hillside, near-imaginary and immobile. Nothing saw us. “Maybe they wouldn’t notice if we just left to have a rest.”

We left and as soon as we broke the line of vision leading to us we started laughing. That excitement of knowing you’re doing something wrong and will suffer for it. She held my hand and it was soft, a loose grip that didn’t let go and said I do this because Why refrain. I turned and said “I love you” and she said “You know I do too.”

When we got to a small pond she turned around and took her shirt off. I reached out to touch her breasts and run my fingers down her stomach and everything was soft. She put her arms around me and the weight of them, that I could feel her and know she was there, was like an anesthesia; in it I forgot all seconds leading to that one and thought for the time that we were freed. I pressed into her, trying to feel all the weight I could.

She kissed me. I kept kissing back. It was the first time and her lips were like fresh plums and I imagined eating one without teeth or closing my jaw. She led me into the water, which was cold at first, but we warmed and everything was bliss. We were naked pressing our bodies together. We might have made love if we had the time. To me I wanted nothing more. But soon the dogs came to find us.

When we were still undisturbed she said, “Pete let’s drown, because down there we can be together forever.” I didn’t know she thought things like that. Now that I’ve left her I love her even more.

“Because none of you work hard enough we need other things to get by,” the master said, walking a circle around us. Our stomachs were filled with those gaseous sighs that come when you haven’t had breakfast to ease you out of drowsiness but we could ignore them. We were all naked and standing against the brick wall of an abandoned schoolhouse, the lines of hopscotch courts still faint and you could see the chalkboards through the windows with lessons never erased. There were train tracks with brambles full-grown between the planks and Abe once said If you followed those trains to the end I believe you’d roll right down God’s throat and live in the bathroom of His stomach until death, when you’d wake up in His hand. It could be.

The master touched each one of our ribs like they were a staircase for his fingers and tried to trip us to see who could keep their balance. The ones who fell were shot in the back of the head before standing. “We need fewer mouths to feed and more humans to sell.” I could smell the gray matter like sushi on the ground or imagined I could. So when he shook me I stayed standing, smelling it. “God, you’re thin. How can you be any good to me so thin like that?”

“Master, I’m determined to serve you; because I want you to eat well so you’re not as thin as me.”

And his expression stayed the same so I relaxed. But when he reached Lilly his hands went to her breasts and wouldn’t let go, squeezing them like they were unliving. He had this smile I still see sometimes when I’m sleeping and Lilly’s face down like someone at a funeral looking into the casket.

“I don’t think I ever seen you exposed like this, missy,” he said. “You look better than I thought you would, with all the dirt and sweat of the fields spread over you. But no, you ain’t a rabid animal now, huh? Tell you what.” He grabbed her wrist and flung her forward and she hit the ground soundlessly. “We’ll make a baby with you.”

When he turned to choose one of us I thought Please be me Please be me Please be me though regretted myself when I looked at her, limp and submissive on the concrete.

Instead he chose Emroy, who could work as long as he wanted and I don’t even think he needed to sleep when it was time to.

One night, after the candle went down and suffocated until lightless, they made love. Though I can only think of it as sex, sex, sex, sex, because Lilly should only make love to me. Even if we haven’t. You heard the sheets rustling and breath that might have been words whispered. Then kisses only coming from one mouth and her saying, “Don’t.” The kisses stopped, and the rustling paused, then it resumed metronomic. I listened to this because I couldn’t go away. A lot of moaning from him and from her only shallow gasps.

The next day when we were working he said to me, “She was beautiful” and I couldn’t say anything back.

This happened a few more times between them and then they understood that Lilly wasn’t going to get pregnant. Emroy made love to someone else and soon became a father.

There’s more I remember about her. But it’s weird the way love is because it can inflate by itself. All the words we exchanged you could write in pen on your skin and still have room for more words; that was the nature of things. I spoke to her at night and thought of her in the mornings. When we were awake they’d rather we do neither.