Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [84]
“Anywhere but here,” she said. “Anywhere but this fuck-ing motel.”
Then one night when I knocked on the door Lila answered it right away, smiling. Her front tooth was crooked and I felt bothered that I hadn’t noticed it before.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He’ll be back at the end of the week. He’s bringing some girls up from Los Angeles. Get in here.” She held the door open.
I thought, I have never seen her so beautiful. Her eyes were bright and she leaned against me and grabbed my hand.
“Four days!” she said. “Four days of nothing to do. Fucking thank God.” She sat at the little table and leaned over something, then looked up at me. “Gators,” she said, and that’s what they started to look like to me, white rows of teeth. She cut them with the sharp edge of a driver’s license with a picture that didn’t look like her.
When she was done I leaned over and she showed me how to snort them, how to follow each line with a palmful of water that dripped bitter down the back of my throat, until the room felt frantic and bright and both of us right in the center of it; fireflies, I thought, burning hot in the cup of someone’s hand.
“Let’s look outside,” Lila suggested. She opened the curtain and the only thing I could see were our own wavering faces in the glass. I kissed her then; her mouth was dry. She pulled back. “I’m not a dyke,” she said. The smell of her cigarette; I thought of my mother, waking for a second from her slow fugue when I came home with my hair cut close to my skull—No daughter of mine is going to be a fucking dyke, she’d said, and turned back to the wall. “I’m not,” Lila said again, but then she put her mouth to mine.
We kissed for a long time and then Lila stood and went to the sink and pulled something out of the makeup bag she kept there. A knife. “Cut an X,” she said. She took her shirt off and her breasts were pale and I thought about reaching out very carefully to touch them but was afraid.
She sat on the edge of the bed and put the knife in my hand. It was heavy and cold. “Just a single X,” she said. “Just two crossing lines.” Her skin was so white. She touched her shoulder blade. “Here … Ten years ago,” she continued, “they say you could stand at one end of Eighty-second and watch the girls jumping in and out of cars in beautiful dresses.”
I traced an X in the air above her perfect skin. I couldn’t do it, I thought.
“Where did you live before here?” Lila asked. “What were you like? Did you have some beautiful life?”
The cluttered apartment; the recliner with its smell of smoke and age; my mother, in her chair, with her heavy silver accordion, pushing the bellows in and out, her eyes on the wall behind me. It was another five years before she died, and then there were eight people at the funeral, all dressed in black, like a circle of bats fluttering at each other. A necklace of them, I had thought, standing around the terrible throat of her grave.
“It was beautiful,” I said. “I had a house with a garden. And a puppy named Soldier.”
Lila sighed. “It sounds nice.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I thought I was in love with Mark, but then—” She looked up at me. “We could make a thousand dollars in a day, him and I, when we started. I didn’t used to mind it. We were going to get a house too.” She touched my arm. “An X,” she said. “Do it.” I squeezed the handle of the knife in my hand and pulled, twice. There were two thick red lines that swelled and spilled.
Mark came back late that night. I lay on the bed in my room next door and I could hear him through the thin wall. “What the fuck are you thinking?” he was saying. “No