Sing Her Down, page 8
It’s quiet again.
Another minute of walking west. Up ahead a service station glows garish in the dark.
Her footsteps now have an echo—a lonely, hollow reverb. Florida pauses. The echo continues, coming closer. Not an echo after all, but someone approaching from the opposite direction—the silhouette backlit by the gas station’s glare, a lone woman rising from the street.
Florida stutter-steps. But Dios—because of course it is Dios—doesn’t falter, a towering demon stepping toward the light.
Florida’s urge is to backtrack.
Dios will see that as weakness.
So they meet in the middle—facing off, Florida on the sidewalk, Dios in the street, the pale dome of her forehead incandescent. A second moon.
“I missed my stop,” Dios says.
“This is your stop?” A momentary flush of relief hits Florida. “Ontario?”
“Is that where we are?”
“Fuck you, Dios. What are you doing here?”
“That CO was getting on my nerves. Anyway, I already told you that this is our story.”
“And I told you it isn’t.”
Dios glances over her shoulder. “What are you doing here? What is Florida doing in Ontario?”
“Getting away from you.”
“Yet here I am.” Dios turns and starts back in the direction of the gas station. “Are you coming or what?”
Florida hesitates, letting Dios put more pavement between them.
* * *
The fluorescent lights burn Florida’s eyes. The familiar snacks and drinks seem foreign.
Dios stands in front of the coolers, her bandana over her nose and mouth. She pulls the door wide and grabs two six-packs. She shows the clerk her out-of-state ID, mugging with her eyes over her face covering, like maybe it’s me, maybe it isn’t. She asks him to throw in an opener.
Outside they crack the beers.
Florida tucks her six-pack under her arm.
“Cheers,” Dios says. “To the future. To the now. To the eternal present.”
The beer is an echo of remembered sensation as it goes down. It is a thousand nights and a thousand stories that all started out the same way.
“Cheers,” Florida says. She nearly polishes off the bottle before taking a breath. Her head is swimming. She’d been three years sober—never succumbed to contraband temptations inside. And now it hits her hard, like the come-up on ecstasy or the gut swirl of a couple of shots back-to-back.
“Easy, girl,” Dios says.
Florida swigs to make Dios fade from view. She swigs again and the world spins faster.
“So here we are,” Dios says.
“There’s no we, and we are nowhere,” Florida says.
Dios drapes an arm around Florida’s shoulder. “You should have thought of that before you tried to close that circle with Tina.”
“No.”
“Before you needed me to clean up your mess.”
“No.”
“How hot were you burning the night of the riot? Did it feel the same as when you handed Carter those matches?”
“I don’t have to listen to your shit, Dios.”
“Or did it feel better because you weren’t high? Because you knew what you were doing?”
Florida swigs her beer. “I don’t have to—” Florida feels her free hand curl into a fist.
“Or did it feel better because you were in control? You weren’t just calling the shots, you were making them. It was your foot kicking Tina in the ribs. It was your fist in her face. Was it a relief? A release?” Dios takes Florida by the chin and pivots her head so they are face-to-face. “It must have felt good, right? It must have felt good to let it out after all those years. That first punch must have felt like a dam breaking.”
Florida’s mind is slowing. Just a few sips of beer have made her thoughts sluggish and soft. But one thing is certain—it hadn’t felt like a dam breaking. That first hit she landed on Tina—that first hit she’d landed on anyone—had felt urgent and immediate, as essential as breathing.
“You had to shut her up, didn’t you? You had to close that circle.”
Tina—raving up and down the tiers the night of the riot. Tina—calling the whole prison murderers. Tina—calling everyone out for their guilt. For their secrets. Tina, who knew the truth about Florida.
“So I fucking punched her, Dios. So what?”
“You punched, kicked, and beat her when she was down. You broke her and then you didn’t stop. You couldn’t stand it, could you, that she was going to tell us all about the real you? Funny thing—you didn’t have to. She made you show us.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
Dios wags Florida’s chin side to side. “But you came so close. So very close. And that’s where I came in. I finished what you started. I closed that circle for you. And now here we are.”
“I keep telling you, there’s no we.” Florida tries to jerk free of Dios’s grasp. But Dios tightens her fingers, pinching before letting go.
“But you’re wrong. Without me, Tina might have survived, might have told everyone what you’d done. I saved you so you could be yourself.”
“That’s insane.”
Dios hurls an empty bottle. The glass shatters like an explosion. “Is it? Or did you want her to regain consciousness, tell everyone who beat her and how bad? Because then, well, then, none of this.” Dios spreads her arms wide to the dark street.
“I don’t want this. I’m going home.”
Dios tilts her head back and laughs. “Home. There is no home for you, Florence. Not anymore. Not after what you’ve done. You might return to your mother’s house—but it’s never going to be a home. Let me tell you something.” She loops her arm through Florida’s as they move in lockstep away from the service station.
“I tried going back to Queens when I dropped out of college. You know what I found? My old crew had broken up. They were mothers now. Wives. Fucking baby mamas and mistresses. Only three years after I left and they fell apart—abandoned, broke, and beat down. They let that shit happen. Because why? Because they were playing the part that had been written for them. One day we’re all stealing from bodegas and the Rite Aid, the next they’re letting their boyfriends and bosses run the show. Suddenly they’re working for my former classmates at that fancy college. They were their nannies and cleaners. They were checkout clerks and tellers.
“They hung in parks and on stoops, bitching and moaning about their fucked-up lives. And still they froze me out, like I was the lowlife. Because who the hell was I? A kid who won the scholarship lottery, got silver-spooned up in the world. They acted like my rich New England stink made them gag.
“But they weren’t paying attention. They were getting packed closer together and sidelined as hipsters arrived in our hood looking for the next cool thing—invaders who spread and sprawled like they owned the place. Didn’t even look at my old crew. Looked through them, in fact. Looked through everyone.
“Sometimes one of these kids caught my eye. Sometimes one of them mistook me for part of their tribe.”
Dios squeezes Florida’s shoulder. “Are you listening? This is the good part. One night I was cutting through the small park where I used to break dawn with my girls. This white girl with hair that looks like it’s been cut by nail scissors appears. She stops and looks up at a street sign like it’s written in a foreign language. She’s drunk or high. She’s staggering and smiling at fuck-all.
“She sees me. At first she takes a step back. Then she relaxes, like there’s something copacetic between us. And she’s all, Excuse me, um, do you know how to get to, um, in her white-girl way. Then she holds up her phone. Thirty-Seventh, she says.
“Avenue or street? I ask her.
“Avenue, maybe, she says, her tone letting me know that where she comes from avenue numbers don’t run so high. She looks at her phone again. Oh, Thirty-Seventh Avenue and Eighty-First Street.
“So I raise my hand to point the way, but then something knocks loose inside me. Instead of pointing, I punch. And then I fucking punch her again and again. I just full-on batter the woman’s face. I broke her nose and split her lip like I was snapping a hot dog. Blackened both her eyes and delivered a couple of kicks in the ribs, then stomped her skull to make sure she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Don’t look at me like that, Florida.
“Two days later, my college roommate turns up in Queens. She’s all on edge as we walk down Broadway. She tells me that a young woman got a terrible beatdown right around the corner. This place isn’t safe, she said. Like because she comes from a safer place she can explain my own neighborhood to me.
“Like I don’t know the violence of my own life.
“She told me I needed to get out, that I can’t backslide into this world. That I’d come too far.
“She was fucking right and she didn’t even know it. I had come too far.
“Florida—once the violence cracks open inside you, home is a place you leave behind. You burst from it, reborn. Fucking parthenogenized into your own life. Your home becomes a place that fits like a shrunk glove, an old shoe. You outgrow it like you outgrow the self who’d lived there. You become you and there’s no turning back.”
* * *
They are three beers in. They’ve been walking north. The pavement sways beneath Florida’s feet. The mountains sway in the distance. The booze makes the world dip and bow.
Dios hurls another bottle.
The shattering glass sparks Florida’s nerves.
“Easy, girl.”
“Ghost town,” Dios says—inside Florida’s thoughts as always. She raises her voice to the darkness.
Pero nunca se fijaron
En tan humilde señora
“Shut up with that narco shit,” Florida says. The songs remind her of jail—of being trapped inside with Dios’s bullshit.
“Just listen.”
“I’ve been listening for two years.”
“They never noticed such a humble lady.”
“And that’s you, the humble lady?” Florida laughs.
“They’ll never see us coming,” Dios says. “Never ever.”
They pass a shuttered saloon in a strip mall whose parking lot is filled with overflowing dumpsters. Dios heads for the bar. It’s locked, of course. A single light illuminates the dusty bottles. Dios rattles the door handle.
“Come on,” Florida says. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? What do you think I’m doing?” Dios cracks a smile, splitting her already busted lip. She rattles the door even harder. It groans. Florida scurries back across the lot. She swigs a fresh beer.
“You’re not breaking in there,” Florida says. But it’s too late. Dios has smashed the glass with a discarded paint can from one of the dumpsters.
There is no alarm, just the sound of Dios’s shoes crunching over glass. “You coming?”
By the time Florida enters, Dios is uncorking a bottle.
Beneath the musty scent of disuse, the bar smells like bar—sweet, sticky, smoky. A smell Florida associates with bad sex and bad decisions.
Dios dives behind the counter, fumbling with switches. Lights flicker on and off. A motorized disco ball pivots overhead.
“Jesus, Dios,” Florida says. “Kill the lights.”
Dios slides her the bottle. “Drink,” she says. “Drink and shut up. Or drink and enjoy yourself.”
Florida takes the bottle.
“See,” Dios says as the warm—what is it, whiskey?—hits Florida’s lips. “They didn’t rehabilitate you for shit. B-and-E and chasing beer with booze.”
Florida blinks away the whiskey’s burn. “This was all you.”
“You and me.”
They pass the bottle, drinking their legs to jelly.
Then the music comes on and they are dancing, spinning and staggering, slip-sliding on the broken glass and holding on to each other before they fall.
Florida stumbles over to the stereo and cuts the tunes. Dios chases her but aborts her mission as headlights slice the dark outside.
Together they cower beneath the bar, numb, dumb excitement drowning Florida’s fear.
The headlights vanish. And it’s just the two of them, squashed together on the rubber no-slip mat, a tangle of breath and booze.
Dios’s viper face is inches from Florida’s—a trickle of blood spidering down her busted lip. She yanks Florida to her feet.
Then they are outside on rubber legs.
Then Florida has fallen to the ground. Just leave me. Then—she’s not sure after how long or what happened in between—Dios is standing over her again. The blood has dried on her chin.
“Eat.” She holds out a bag of chips. Florida tears them open sideways, spilling them onto her lap. The salt, grease, and solid food make the world spin slower.
They have come a few blocks from the bar. They are sitting on a low overpass that looks down into a bracken-filled basin.
“Desert,” she says, nodding at the scrub.
“This isn’t the desert,” Dios says.
“Desert,” is all Florida can reply. Because it’s too much to explain that the desert seems to have crawled west and met them here.
“Florida,” Dios says, “listen to me.” She squats down, her mouth inches from Florida’s. Florida squints, trying to steady Dios’s face, which is a kaleidoscope, spinning and fragmenting.
“The world is on pause,” Dios says. She puts a hand on Florida’s shoulder. “But we aren’t. We are on the move.”
“I’m sitting,” Florida says. “Just let me sit.”
“The world isn’t paying attention to us. We can do what we want. This is our time.” Dios’s eyes glitter in the dark. She smiles broadly, releasing another trickle of blood from her lip. Florida squints. Her head rolls back against the chicken wire fence that’s preventing her from tipping into the desert below.
Dios is beautiful. She is a goddess and a demon. She holds out her hands and pulls Florida to her feet.
“You and me—this is our moment. It’s happening.”
There’s a trick in here somewhere but Florida can’t find it.
The world is spinning. Florida’s getting on board. It seems safer than being left behind, dizzy and alone.
Her hands are in Dios’s. She is allowing Dios to spin her wildly. “I don’t understand,” Florida says. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ve already started.”
“Okay,” Florida says. “Okay.”
Dios lets go. Florida staggers backward and hits the pavement. She rolls over so she’s staring at the sky, where the stars are smeared crossways. Then she sits up and watches headlights approaching the overpass. As a white pickup rolls to a stop, Florida closes her eyes again and lies back, blocking out the world.
* * *
Florida comes to in the cab of a pickup halfway closer to nowhere from the look of things. Dios is holding out a tiny white pill that Florida recognizes as trucker speed. She and Ronna used to buy it from out-of-town gas stations or when they went road-tripping with Renny.
Renny? Where did that name come from?
She closes her eyes and lets Dios place the tablet on her tongue.
The last fifteen minutes come back to her in flashes, like someone’s rewinding an old VHS tape.
The pickup rolling to a stop.
A man leaning over and out the passenger window.
Dios asking for a ride to LA.
The man refusing. Something about a cesspool or a shithole. Something about slick billionaires and the dirty homeless. But he could take them somewhere.
Then Dios helping her up. Then Dios giving the man their real names. His name: Drew. Then Dios whispering into Florida’s ear not to worry. This is our game. Then black.
And now black again as Florida lolls her head back and the truck rattles on.
The Mini Thin hits with a jolt, electrifying Florida just in time for her to feel the pickup buck over some railroad tracks. In the distance—a train whistle.
It’s more country than suburb or small city now. Florida realizes they’re heading toward the mountains.
“Just me and a few buddies out back. Let them camp on my spot. Free and all. Don’t have any use for the exchange of currencies. At least right now. What I own I own free and clear. No bank. Nohow.”
The pickup winds up a hill.
“World’s heading that way. Infrastructure is a thing of the past. Banks are a tool of oppression. A trick. That’s how they steal your money when the world collapses. They cut off the electricity. Lock your cash inside.”
Up and twisting up until they grind to a halt on an uneven driveway.
The house is a cabin wrapped in peeling clapboards. Behind it is a small RV and a camper trailer with a curtain over the back window. Two men slide from these like shadows, spilling into the light of a campfire that shouldn’t be burning in the brittle, thirsty land.
Florida’s buzzing. The tablet has numbed the booze and she’s more alert than drunk. She follows Drew and Dios to the fireside. She sits on a plastic crate watching the flame-licked faces across from her, everyone lashed by devil tongues. One of the men is tall—half his face mottled by a burn scar, skin like melted wax. He wears three enormous rings—dark stones cupped by claws and talons, the kind of jewelry Florida and Ronna bought for kicks on Venice Beach. The kind of jewelry Renny gave them.
That name again. Florida claps a hand to her forehead, trying to bury the memory as she stares at the man across the firepit.
He’s missing teeth. He has an ankh painted or tattooed next to one eye. Half of his nails are blackened or polished black.
The other man is small, reddened, and bumpy—skin pickled and pocked by booze and the wind. He’s shaking—he holds his hands toward the fire for warmth on the warm evening. His fingers glow. His nails are yellow. His hair is yellowing gray and pulled into a ponytail.
“I brought friends,” Drew says.
Florida gets a good look at him too for the first time—tall, skinny, hollow-cheeked with a crease from eye to jaw on each side. Scraggly brown hair that brushes his shoulders. A face like a hawk.
