Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng

Author:Bill Cheng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Last year on his twenty-first birthday Robert had fetched himself a shave and gone to a movie, a double feature. He shrank into the sticky velvet of his seat. The theater was full of people—dozens of staring eyes, silent as trees. He could feel their heat clouding the air, drawing over him. On the screen a white woman billowed out big and silky in her sun hat. Dust popped and crackled on her cheeks. It’d been eight years already since the fire in Bruce. It was a memory he kept tasting, faint like metal in blood.

He couldn’t sit all the way through the first film. On the sidewalk, the afternoon was bright and hot. There were cinders in his eyes, and he mashed his palms into his sockets.

Around the corner, he found a bar with a COLOREDS WELCOME sign hanging from the door. The trash was piled to the windows, and a cloud of moths danced on the glass. Inside, the bar was empty and a stale smell like wet wool hung in the air. An electric fan was going, moving the dust around. He turned to leave when a man came in through a trapdoor from behind the counter. He was a white man, short and fat with swollen cheeks. His oily hair was parted in the middle. The man smiled and motioned with his smooth, fish-pale arms.

Sit at the counter?

He leaned over and wiped a stool with a rag.

Robert sat down and the seat was smooth with grease.

What can I get you?

I don’t have but fifteen cents.

The man looked him over slowly. How ’bout a sandwich?, he asked. On the house.

The sandwich was stale and oversalted. Still he wolfed it down, chewing the hard rough bread. When he swallowed, he tasted blood and tongued the bright sting in his cheek.

New in town?

Robert looked at the man carefully.

It’s just that I never seen you around here before.

I bale cotton on the Jones-Tennessy plantation.

That so?

That’s so.

He turned back to his sandwich. The man rested his hands on his belt and the air shifted inside him. He cleared his throat and busied himself with filling up a glass with a pitcher of water.

What’s your name, son?

Billy, he lied.

Those hands of yours are awful soft-looking for handling baling wire.

Robert stood up and pushed off from the counter.

Thanks for the sandwich, he said.

Now wait a minute. I was just talking.

Robert started for the door, but it opened inward in front of him. It would’ve smashed into him if he hadn’t jumped out of the way. There was a girl on the other side. She looked up at him, startled.

That’s my daughter, the man said from behind him. He was grinning.

Your daughter?

The girl was colored and there were wires in her teeth. Her eyes were big and staring, flecks of gold in the iris. She was smiling up at him.

You can call her Marie, he said.

Is that really your daughter?

Maybe, the man said. Are you interested?

The girl had already started to working. She was looking him up and down, dragging her smooth nail down the front of his shirt.

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