Suitcase City (19 page)

Bloodworth Naylor, a boy from Rosewood, the black town not far from Cedar Key, joined the group of teenage smugglers halfway through their run. One of the football players brought him in, a boy who was considered smarter than most. The boy vouched for Naylor and said they needed a black kid to sell to his people in the university city. In Cedar Key, things were uneasy between blacks and whites, but this was business, and the young Naylor, who also seemed smarter than most, did his job well.

* * *

Teach knelt in the pulpit of the
Fortunate
and gave the anchor line a last tug for luck. He felt the boat move with Dean’s weight as she climbed over the transom. He went aft and watched her towel off, marveling at the supple beauty of her limbs. She’d danced since she was six years old, and her flexibility was a thing that made Teach wince. She could stand on one foot next to a wall with the ankle closest to it pressed against her ear. Smiling. Her arms and calves were muscular without the bulk or excessive definition that, at least to Teach’s eyes, seemed masculine. To him, she represented everything that was decent and fine about growing up healthy and disciplined in America.

She tossed the towel onto a cockpit bench and looked at the beer in his hand. “How many?” She put her hands on her hips, tilted her chin, and made scolding eyes.

“The first,” Teach said, laughing. “Shall I write them in the log for you?”

“No need. I trust you. Can I have one?”

He looked at her. Paige had explained to him certain principles she considered to be European. Let the children drink with you, and you habituate them to alcohol in a congenial, responsible way. At dinner Paige had given Dean glasses of wine mixed with water saying it was what French parents did. Dean had drunk the mixture, smiled like a pirate’s wench, and said she’d rather have half a glass straight up.

Teach went to the cooler and got her a Heineken. They touched bottles. “To getting away with it,” he said, watching his daughter’s eyes.

She thought about the toast, then gave him the look of mischief and delight he had hoped for. She drank and her eyes darkened. “Dad, do you think it’s really all over?”

“Sure,” he said, not entirely sure. “You want a freshwater shower?”

“Naw, it’s only twelve hours till I go swimming again.”

“That’s my girl.”

Teach went below to get some grouper filets for the grill and the things Dean would need to set the table in the cockpit. It was fully dark now, and he hung a Coleman lantern from the backstay.

“Daddy,” Dean said, “Tawnya told me Tyrone’s going to a special prep school up in Massachusetts. It’s called Bede. They’ve got a football team, but it’s nothing like ours, and the school’s full of behavior problems. She said it’s one of those places where the Kennedys and the Rockefellers send their kids that get the XYY chromosome or something.”

“She said that? That Tawnya’s some girl.”

Dean set the table with paper plates and two more beers. She put out a container of potato salad and some apples. Teach looked at the beers, at his daughter. Dean smiled. “Come on, Dad, this is our getting-away-with-it cruise.”

“All right, but that’s it. You’ll be swimming with a hangover in the morning.”

“You think that school can really fix a guy like Tyrone?” She looked at him with hope in her eyes.

Teach had no difficulty reassuring her. “Sure I do, baby. They know what they’re doing. In two years, they’ll get him into Princeton. And Princeton’s got a pretty good football team.”

Dean was sitting now, watching him season the grouper filets. He wanted to protect her faith in the world. “Tyrone’s lucky to have an uncle willing to invest in his future like that. Incredibly lucky.”

In the lantern light, Dean’s face was serious. “So,” she said, “you could say we saved Tyrone. You and me and Tawnya.”

Teach nodded, took her hand, and kissed it. “Yes, baby. I think we can say that.”

“Good. Can I tell Tawnya that?”

“Sure, honey. Go ahead and tell her.”

And why not? Maybe news of saving grace was in short supply for two young friends, a black girl and a white one, growing up in the last decade of the twentieth century.

TWENTY-THREE

Thalia lived in a duplex in Suitcase City. Blood knew she didn’t have a roommate like most of the other girls did. They lived together for protection, for family. Better to have somebody with you, even if she’s in the life. Better a ho than nobody. Blood wondered how many little ho families lived in the Suitcase. He was daddy to a lot of them himself. Thalia lived alone. Blood knew that much. He’d followed her home before.

The day he’d learned that Battles had dropped the lawsuit, he’d followed her all night, watched her do four tricks, watched her smoke crack behind a dumpster with two other girls, watched her stagger the streets after that, singing, muttering. One of the walking dead. One of the zombitches.

She had fallen hard since she’d been the good girl who’d taken Blood’s heart. Her letters to him at Raiford, before he stopped reading them, had told him what it was like to rise up to that world of white people. In the last letter Blood had read, she’d told him how she loved the quiet at the country club. Nobody screaming, jiving, laughing, telling loud stories. She had written,
I love how it’s just so peaceful.

Thalia’s place was like a thousand others in the Suitcase. A lime-green cinder-block rectangle that held two apartments. Paint peeling from the walls, the roof shingles blistering under the hammering sun, dead oleanders in the yard. Blood parked a half-block down and watched the street for a while. Two Harleys with rebel flags painted on their gas tanks across the street. A diesel tractor parked in the driveway of the house next door. Canvas awnings in drooping shreds from the last tropical storm. A half-dead Doberman lying in a sand hole near the curb where Blood was parked. The dog watched him, but didn’t have the energy to come over for a sniff or a snarl.

But somebody was sniffing. A black man, wearing a purple shirt and green slacks, came out of Thalia’s front door and stopped on her walk, looking both ways like his wife might be waiting out there. Dude looking down at his tight green pants, running his hand up the zipper, tugging it the last inch, then walking to his car. A new Mustang 5.0. Thalia could still attract a client with money.

When the guy drove off, Blood walked up to Thalia’s apartment. Before knocking, he thought about it one more time, why he was here. It was some fool’s combination of wanting her to quit the life and come back to him, and wanting to see her so fucked up he could forget about her forever. He could hear music from inside, Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing,” and see the soft light coming through the curtains. Thalia liked candles, little lamps with colored glass shades, mirrors that reflected light. She liked anything that smelled good—incense, flowers, candles that released a scent when they burned.

Blood tried the door and it opened. He moved across the dark living room to the bedroom. She was lying on the bed in a filmy rose-colored robe and black underpants. Her small, firm breasts were bare. She was smoking a cigarette and humming to Marvin’s smooth, cool jam.

Blood watched her. He hadn’t been this close to her in more than two years. The crazy thing was that she was still beautiful. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, and her cinnamon face was gaunt. She looked like those Somalis Blood had seen on TV, so pretty in their starvation. Their copper cheeks scooped out, and their eyes burning bright with that need. Thalia had the large, surprised eyes of a doll, but her mouth was thin for a black girl, and her pretty little chin had a small cleft. It was a strong face, a face Blood had once thought had character. Now, with her eyes closed, her mouth moving, the cigarette coming and going from lips too tired to suck much from it, she looked like a woman singing in her sleep.

Blood looked around the room. A condom and two empty wrappers on the floor beside the bed, a hundred-dollar bill on the night table, a crack pipe and two rocks beside the money, and a pretty blue scarf thrown over the bedside lamp. The light shining through the scarf gave the room a blue wash. Scarves hung all around the place. Scarves in wild colors and patterns, all of them silk, all expensive. Blood smiled, remembering the scarves.

Candles, twenty of them at least, burned on every surface. They stood in saucers and teacups and on pieces of colored paper, smoking, scenting, dripping in weird, tortured shapes. Quietly, Blood walked over to a candle on Thalia’s night table. The hot red wax had run onto the tabletop, pooling around a tube of red lipstick. He righted the candle.

“You doing here, nigger?”

Blood jumped, concealed it with a pivot, a nod of his head. For all his thinking about her, following her, planning to come here, he had no idea what to say. No idea who he was tonight. Was he the man who had kept his evil friends away from her, who had never raised a hand to her? The man who had gone to prison planning to come out and make a life with her?

“Looking at you, woman. Watching you lie there singing to yourself.”

Thalia threw her legs off the bed and sat up, bracing herself with both hands. She lifted a hand to her forehead, held it there, then reached for the crack pipe. In two big strides, Blood was there, twisting it from her fingers. She fought him for it. When he won, easily, she shrugged, laughed, fell back on the bed, her legs parted, the black panties wet between her legs.

Blood looked away from her. “Goddamnit, woman, you’ve had enough of that shit for one night.”

“Listen to him.” Her voice was a low slur. “Man sells it, promotes pussy with it, and he tells me I had enough of it.”

“Never mind what I do.”

Thalia looked up at him, smiled. “Long as you here,” she said, “you might as well come on down here with me. Course, you got to pay just like everybody else. Thalia Speaks don’t give it away no more. You got to
pay
.”

Blood made himself look at her. She parted her legs a little more, threw her arms back, laced her fingers behind her head. “Come on, John,” she said, calling him by the age-old trick’s name. “What you waiting for?”

Blood reached down and threw one wing of the long, filmy negligee over her. It didn’t cover much. That was the point of it, to tease. But he did it, then turned way. “I didn’t come here for that, Thalia.” Saying her name. Something important in that. He remembered it now, calling her just
Thale
. Using that name when they made love. She moved on the bed behind him.

“Answer my question then, Blood. What you doing here?” She was talking the street to him, talking the hood. Taunting him with it, making him remember how she had learned to talk like a white woman.

Blood made his own voice as correct as he could. “I don’t know why I came here. I just wanted to see you.”

“Why you want to see this ol’ ho?” She was driving it in, giving him no room.

“I told you, I don’t know.” The anger in his voice surprised him. He was about to say he’d had to come, but he couldn’t let her know that.

He turned. She was lying on her side with her head propped on her hand. One leg thrown over the other now, hiding that beautiful, slave-making pussy from him. Blood was thankful for that.

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I got it. I know why you here.” She pushed herself up and snatched the scarf from over the lamp on the bedside table. The room was suddenly brighter, and Blood blinked like something soft that lived under a rock. A thing with no skeleton inside it. Thalia stood up unsteadily and walked across the room and turned on the overhead light. “You came here to see what you made me into. That’s it. Well, here it is, look at it.” She threw her arms out and stood in front of him, crucified, smiling.

“Bitch,” Blood said, “I didn’t make you anything. A white man did that. Mr. Teach. Mr. Drug Company Vice President did that.”
And a howling hypocrite too,
he thought.
The man I smuggled with, the man who told me one night in a bar he had to disappear.
“And I advise you to do the same,” Teach had said that night in Cedar Key. Teach’s eyes narrowing with the pain under the bandage in his armpit. And when Blood asked what happened out there, what happened after Teach the pilot left with the shrimper and the three Guatemalans, and Blood drove the load to Gainesville, Teach would only say, “It’s better you don’t know that.”

Thalia looked at him fiercely, took a step toward him, another, still holding her arms out straight. She knotted her fists, the muscles of her arms rigid. “No, Teach just a
weak
white man. You a fucking ho master. You a fucking pimp. You made me, not him.” She coughed, staggered from the effort, the anger.

Blood went to her, took her by the shoulders, and lowered her to the bed. There she was again on her back, her legs spread, the dark eyes of her firm little breasts watching him. She was exhausted from talking to him, telling him her truth.

But she didn’t mean
him
. She meant someone like him. Some other pimp who had turned her out while Blood was still in the joint. Some pimp who had put her ass to work after she’d fallen out of that country club and smoked her first pipe of crack. Some people smoked crack once, and it owned them forever. She was one of them. It was the way Blood had been the first time she’d let him inside, the first time she’d come to him with the song of her pleasure. No nigger would have dared touch her if Blood had not been locked down.

Standing over her again, observing her exhaustion, the pain she said was his gift to her, Blood understood it. Knew what he had to do. He let down his trousers and touched himself, surprised to find that he was already hard. The power she had. The thing that had to end here tonight. He tore open the wrapper of the condom and put it on. Then he knelt and slipped off her panties, opened her, pushed up her knees, stared into her eyes. They were smiling, they understood, they knew this had to happen. Blood put himself in, started working, long, slow strokes. Feeling it, that magic she had, that thing no other woman could do. Now he understood it—working, the sweat rising on him, the pleasure filling him—knew what he could do for her. The thing no one else could do.