Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [52]
“Wake up,” Katy whispers, and leans over to bite my naked shoulder. “Wake up. Wake up!”
“No,” I say, “not you.”
But I knew she was coming. I could hear her echoes peeling back off the moments, the way Aunt Raylene always said she could hear a spell coming on. Katy’s persistent. Some of my ghosts are so faded: they only come when I reach for them. This one reaches for me.
“Sit up,” she says. “I won’t bite you.” But her teeth are sharp in the pale light, and I sit up warily. The only predictable thing about Katy was her stubborn perversity; she would mostly do whatever she swore solemnly she would not.
“Shit,” I whisper, and roll over. She laughs and passes me a joint. The smoke wreathes her like a cloak, heavy and sweet around us. I inhale deeply, grin up at her and say, “My hallucinations get me stoned.”
“Lucky you. It costs everyone else money.”
She blows smoke out her nose. Katy has a matter-of-fact manner about her tonight, very unlike herself. It’s been three years since she OD’d, and in that time she’s grown more urgent, not less. This strange air of calmness disturbs me. If the dead lose their restlessness, do they finally go away?
Something falls in the other room, wood striking wood. It’s probably Molly going to the bathroom a little drunk as usual, knocking things over. Katy slides up on one knee and clutches the edge of the waterbed frame. If she were a cat her hair would be on end. As it is, the hair above her ears seems suddenly fuller. I reach over and take the joint from her hand, moving gently, carefully soothing her with only my unspoken demand to hold her.
“You going to wake me up in the night,” I tell her, “you might as well entertain me. Tell me where you got this delicacy. Its mashed pecan, right? Tastes just like that batch we got in Atlanta that time we hitchhiked up from Daytona Beach.”
Still in her cat’s aspect, Katy looks back at me, her huge eyes cold and ruthless. Her expression makes me want to push into her breast, put my tongue to her throat, and hear her cruel, lovely laugh again. It would be easy, delicious and easy, and not at all the way it had been when she was alive. Alive, she was never easy.
“You an’t got no taste at all. It’s Panama City home-grown.” She comes back down on the bed, not disturbing the mattress. “You always talking ’bout that mashed pecan, but first time I got you really stoned on it, you got sick. Spent the night in the bathroom being the most pitiful child. I swear.”
“That was Tampa, and that killer Jamaican.” I draw another deep lungful of the sweet smoke. “In Atlanta, you got sick and threw up on the only clean shirt I had with me.”
Katy gives her laugh finally, and predictably, I feel the goose bumps rise on my thighs. She settles herself so that her naked left hip is against my shoulder. Her skin is smooth, cool, and wonderful. I put my hand on her thigh, and she leans forward to sniff my cheek and rub her lips on my eyebrows. I cannot touch Katy without remembering making love to her on Danny’s couch with a dozen drunk and stoned people around the corner in the living room; the tickle of the feathers she wore laced into the small braids over her ears, and the cold chill of the knife she always pulled out of her boot and pushed under the pillows, the sheathed blade that always seemed to migrate down to the small of my back.
Most of all I remember the talent with which Katy would bite me just hard enough to make me gasp, her bubbling laughter as she whispered, “Don’t make no noise. They’ll hear.” Even now, after all this time, I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then, with drunk and dangerous strangers around the corner and Katy playing at trying to get me to make a sound they might hear. It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and