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From the edges of sleep she heard a raw scraping sound, like a rat clawing inside the walls. When she raised her head from the pillow, she saw the dead bolt on the back door rotating in its socket, then sliding free of the door frame.
The man other people called Johnny Remeta stepped into the room, water sliding off his hat and black raincoat, a metal nail file glinting in his right hand.
“I t’ought you was my auntie. She fixing to be here any minute,” Little Face said.
“Long drive from Lake Charles. Because that’s where she moved to.”
Remeta sat down in a chair next to the bed and leaned forward on his hands, his hatted profile in silhouette against the lightning that leaped above the trees on the bayou.
“Can I take off my things? They’re wet,” he said.
“We ain’t got nothing you want, Rain Man. My baby’s got the croup. I melted Vicks in hot water. That’s how come the room smell like it do. You stay here, you get sick.”
He removed his hat and set it crown-down on the floor, then pulled his raincoat off his shoulders and let it hang wet side out on the back of the chair. His eyes settled on her face and mouth and she saw his throat swallow. She pulled the sheet up to her stomach.
“I ain’t in that life no more,” she said.
He opened and closed his hands on top of his thighs, his veins cording under the skin.
“You’ve been with white men?” he asked.
“Down South the color line never got drawn when it come to the bedroom.”
Then he said something that was lost in the thunder or the thickness that caused his words to bind in his throat.
“I cain’t hear you,” she said.
“What difference does one more make?”
“I ain’t want your money. I ain’t want you, Rain Man. You got to go back where you come from.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” he said.
The rain clattered on the roof and sluiced down over the windows. Little Face could feel her heart beating inside the thinness of her pajama top. The elastic of her nylon panties cut into her skin, but she knew she should not move in order to make herself more comfortable, although she could not explain why she knew this.
Remeta’s breath came out in a ragged exhalation before he spoke.
“I’ve used a trick to scare people so I wouldn’t have to hurt them. I’ll show you,” he said.
He slipped a blue-black snub-nosed revolver from a holster that was attached to his ankle with a Velcro strap. He flipped the cylinder out of the frame and ejected all six rounds into his palm. They were thick and brass-cased and seemed too large for the size of the revolver. He inserted one back into a chamber and spun the cylinder, then flipped the cylinder back into the frame without looking at where the loaded chamber had landed.
“Ever read about Doc Holliday? His edge was everybody knew he didn’t care if he lived or died. So I do this sometimes and it makes people dump in their drawers,” Remeta said.
He cocked the revolver, pressed the barrel against the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.
“See, your face jumped. Just like it was you instead of me about to take the bullet. But I can tell by the weight where the round is,” he said.
She pushed herself up on her hands so her back was against the headboard. She thought she was going to lose control of her bladder. She looked at her baby in the crib and at the glow of a television set inside the cabin of a neighbor who worked nights and at her plastic welfare charge card on the table and next to it the thirteen dollars she had to make last until the end of the week and at the cheap clothes that hung on hangers in her closet. She breathed the funk that rose from her armpits and a soapy odor that either came from her bedclothes or her pajama top, and her breasts seemed to hang like an old woman’s dugs from her skeleton. Her stomach had stretch marks on it and felt flaccid and like a water-filled balloon at the same time, and she realized she owned absolutely nothing of value in this world, not even in her own person, nor could she call upon one friend or resource, to bargain for her and her baby’s life, that if she was lucky the world would simply take what it needed from her and leave a piece of something behind.
“I ain’t gonna fight you no more, Rain Man. I’m just a nigger.”
She pulled the sheet off her and sat on the side of the bed, her feet not quite touching the floor, her eyes downcast.
“You shouldn’t use racial words like that. It’s what whites have taught you people to do. To feel bad about yourself,” he said, and sat beside her. He moved his arm around her waist but did not look at her. Instead, his lips moved silently, as though he were talking to other people in the room.
“You coming apart, Rain Man?” she said.
“You couldn’t guess at what’s in my head, girl.”
