Fox Girl (23 page)

“When I met you,” Chazu was saying, “you seemed so nice. So quiet. I thought I could help you be something better than your mother.” He shook his head, sneering. “But you are more a whore than she ever was.”

Sookie shrieked and flew at his face, clawing at his eyes. “Don't. Talk. About. My. Mother,” she snarled.

Chazu twisted his head and pushed his arm against her throat.

I held the purse against my chest and backed away. I had seen them do this too many times. I decided to wait in the doorway, out of their way but close enough in case Sookie needed my help, until they finished fighting. When they moved into the bedroom, excited by their anger, then I would leave.

“Nothing I do is ever going to change you,” Chazu said. “You're a whore to your bones; it's in your blood.”

“You think you better than me,” Sookie wheezed, “but your blood tastes just like mine.” She angled her head against Chazu's bicep and bit into his skin.

He yelped, jumping back, but Sookie held on, jaws locked on muscle. Sookie's orange hair was tangled in Chazu's fist; he pulled some out at the roots. Tears leaked from her clenched eyes, blood oozed from between her teeth, and Chazu shook her and slapped her in the head.

Finally, Sookie's mouth gaped open and she dropped to the floor. She wrapped her arms around her head as Chazu struck her with his boot. “I would have given you everything you stole from me,” he grunted. “Why didn't you just ask? Why did you have to make me look like a fool?”

Sookie rolled onto her back and opened her arms, leaving her belly unprotected. “That the best you can do? Pussy kicks,” she panted. “Try harder.”

Chazu's foot hovered above her abdomen, and then he put it down, slow and gentle, next to her ribs. “I can't do this anymore,” he whispered. “I'm not like this. I'm not this kind of person.” He dropped to his knees beside her and bowed his head. Get up,” he said, looking at Sookie sprawled in front of him, “and get out. Take anything you want, but don't ever come back.” He rose then, stepping over her to the bedroom, where he closed the door behind him.

I inched into the living room. “Sookie?” I whispered to her prone figure. “Aren't you going to go in after him?”

“No,” Sookie said. “This time, it's over. I knew it before I came here tonight.” She held out her hand and I helped her up.

I handed her her purse. “Um, here,” I said. “I guess we should leave.”

Sookie waved the purse back. “Hold it.” She staggered into the kitchen and pulled the dish towels off the rack. Then she opened up drawers and cabinets and refrigerator and packed whatever she could into the towels: silverware, shot glasses and plastic tumblers, canned Spam and tuna, rice bowls and lemons, grapes and several cans of soda. She knotted the towels, handed me one of the packs, and then marched out of Chazu's apartment.

 

I figured Sookie would return, if not the next morning then within the next few days, but until then the only place she could go was Lobetto's. Since he would be working tonight, I thought we would be alone until at least the next afternoon.

I wasn't expecting to see his mother, back from Cheju with her hair cut short and permed into a tight afro—which meant she had made enough cash to spend on extras. “More trash?” she said, blocking us from entering. “I won't support any more freeloaders.”

I stopped breathing. I hated her so much I couldn't move, couldn't speak. My ears started ringing and my vision blurred until all I could focus on was a tiny black dot swimming above her head. As I stared, that black dot sprouted a head, then little squiggles of arms and legs. The black dot floated toward me and Sookie, hovered above us, and in that brief moment before I had to blink, I saw my child.

“—go on, go,” Lobetto's mother was saying as she waved Sookie away. “You belong with your mother—heard she had a place in the fish tanks,” she said. And then she laughed.

I roared and stalked toward Lobetto's mother. “She stays here.” Lobetto's mother placed her hands on her hips, squaring herself within the door frame. “You're nobody here,” she spat. “What makes you think you have any say here? You're just some stray that Lobetto let in, one of his pets.”

I pushed my face into hers and breathed: “I paid with my child, my body, and my blood.”

Lobetto's mother looked at me and her smug smile wavered, then faded when I bared my teeth. I wanted to bite her, to feel her blood against my teeth. I imagined how satisfied Sookie must have felt when she bit into Chazu's flesh.

Lobetto's mother sniffed. She looked away from me, past my shoulder to Sookie, and said, “Fine. Lobetto can deal with you.” She marched away, and we heard the whine of the television warming up.

I pulled Sookie into the house, past the front room where Lobetto's mother faced the TV, determined to ignore us as we moved through the kitchen and into Lobetto's tent. Under the shelter of blankets, I struck a match to light the lamp, then looked at Sookie.

She looked like shit—hair wild, her face and arms red and swollen where Chazu had slapped and kicked her, neck ringed with purpling bruises.

“Want a cigarette?” I asked, already rummaging under the mattress for Lobetto's stash. Instead of cigarettes, I pulled out a handful of headless Tootsie Pop sticks, the candy sucked and chewed off so thoroughly that the ends were frayed.

Sookie covered her nose and turned away. “I'm tired,” she groaned, and lay down. Hunched in on herself, her hands around her head and knees pulled in to her chest, she looked small, a tiny seed.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

Sookie, eyes closed, didn't answer. I watched her breathing turn slow and even. And then I noticed the pictures Lobetto must have developed spread out next to the mattress. I picked them up, looking at Sookie and me in frame after frame.

It was then that I finally saw: her pale skin, her sickness, her tired eyes, her thickening waist.

All the time I had been calling my baby, Sookie was blocking the way. While I was the one making the wish, Sookie was the one to catch it. She was pregnant, my child in her belly.

When Sookie began to swell past the binding of her skirt and could not work the clubs, she slouched around Lobetto's house. “How did I get stuck with so many useless mouths to feed?” Lobetto would grumble when he stumbled home each morning to find his mother, Sookie, and me stationed in an uneasy truce around the television. “This is begining to look like the inside of the Monkey House.”

“What do you know? You never been inside,” either his mother or Sookie would snap back.

If Sookie was the first one to point this out, Lobetto's mother would scold her before Lobetto could fire off a retort. “Don't talk back to my son,” she'd say, wagging a finger in Sookie's face. “Show him respect as the man of this house.”

But if his mother had been the one to reply to Lobetto's greeting, he would answer, “I know enough to know it's a zoo full of menstruating women.”

“I should be there,” Sookie would moan, rolling back on the floor mat, her mound of stomach pointed toward the ceiling. “I don't know how I let Hyun Jin talk me into having it.”

“I could have fixed you up here,” his mother would say. “If you came to me earlier.”

“Stop it.” I knew they tried to goad me, but I responded each time, afraid if I didn't speak up they might take my silence for agreement. “This baby is you and me, Sookie. It's our chance to be a family.”

“Phah,” Lobetto's mother spat. “What a bunch of shit.”

“I'm getting rid of this thing right now,” groaned Sookie. She made a halfhearted attempt to roll to her feet.

I nudged her back down. “Besides, I told you I'd pay you for your time. I want this child.”

Sookie threw an arm over her head. “And what Hyun Jin wants, Hyun Jin gets.” Her words, muffled, sounded tired. Without bite.

“What's to eat?” Lobetto asked.

“Rice soup. What else?” I opened the drawer of the TV stand and pulled out the bottle of Johnson's Baby Oil I had bought from an ex-bar girl who had married a Joe. The girl liked to flaunt her status as a military wife, and she offered to get goods from the PX at a fraction of the price charged on the black market. Dribbling oil into my hand as Sookie raised her shirt, I began to massage her belly.

“How you going to take care of a baby when you can't even take care of my son?” Lobetto's mother said. “You should get up, get him his food.”

Sookie and I looked at each other and shrugged, unsure of who she was scolding. I swirled the oil into Sookie's navel, which had grown shallower as her belly grew larger. “What does it feel like, inside?” I asked.

Sookie grimaced. “Uncomfortable.”

“Did you hear me?” Lobetto's mother demanded, raising her voice. She struggled up from her knees and made a show of hobbling into the kitchen. “Lobetto,” she called, “sit, sit. I will be the one to serve you.”

I rested my hands on the drum of Sookie's belly, feeling the soft moth-wing movements against my palm.

“Poor Lobetto,” I heard Lobetto's mother whine. “We have so little to eat, all the food going into those beggars you brought home. Kick them out, wasting money.”

“Black dog bitch,” I muttered.

Sookie sighed. “But she's right,” she whispered. “What are we doing here? How long will they let us stay when we're not pulling in any money? Especially when there'll be another mouth soon.”

“Don't worry, Sookie,” I said, pressing my lips into a grim line. “I know what I have to do.”

 

I agreed to start at Club Foxa the next night, and Sookie and Lobetto's mother joined forces to fuss over me. “Remember, pick the shy uglies. They're easy.” Sookie played with my hair, pinning it away from my face with bright silver clips. “And get to them first before all the cows grab them up.”

Lobetto's mother knocked Sookie's hands from my head and pulled the pins out. “She should wear it down, cover up her face more,” she said.

“Or maybe you should wait till the end of the night when everyone is drunk,” Sookie frowned, rethinking her strategy. “Then you can pick up leftovers. No one is choosy at the end.”

I turned away from both of them. “I know what I'm doing,” I snapped. “Back off.”

“Don't have to bite,” Sookie sniffed. “I was just trying to help.”

“You need to make some money tonight,” Lobetto's mother grumbled.

To keep from shaking, I tugged at the straps on my shoulders, smoothed the fabric over my thighs, then called to Lobetto, who lounged outside the door, gnawing on a Tootsie Pop stick as he waited to take me to the Foxa. “Let's go,” I said. I wanted to leave before I ran back to the tent.

Lobetto tucked the stick carefully behind his ear and tugged at the waistband of his pants, which hung low across his hips. From around his neck, he took off a chain and handed it to me. The plastic card on the chain was Sookie's working ID, on the back of which was a record of her shot dates, her menstrual cycle, her visit to the Monkey House. That card, doctored by Lobetto to fit me, was my passport into the clubs. Over Sookie's picture, Lobetto had pasted one of the shots of me he had taken a few months before. I looked naked and feral, an animal hunted for meat.

Lobetto checked me over, then unbuttoned the top two buttons of my dress. I knocked him away and clutched at the opening of my dress. When he tilted his head in question, I dropped my hands.

Lobetto called himself a modern-day matchmaker; for every girl he brought in, the club paid him a couple hundred won, a commission off her earnings. He'd make that off me, and still get whatever I managed to wrestle away from Bar Mama. But it was worth it if it meant shelter for me and Sookie, a safe place for the baby to be born.

“Do like I told you,” he said when he opened the back door of Club Foxa. He shoved a bag of eggplant into my arms.

My arms felt numb; I fumbled the bag. I bent over, hands on my knees, forcing myself to breathe.

“I remember her.” Kitchen Auntie stomped over and leaned down to look into my face. “She didn't look like much when you first brought her by and she looks like even less now.”

“She'll do okay,” Lobetto said, patting me on the back.

I straightened, picked up the vegetables. “I'm better than okay.” I tossed my head, trying to assume a mask of bravado. “It doesn't matter what you think. I know I can make these GIs think I'm the most beautiful girl here.”

Kitchen Auntie laughed. “Yeah, Lobetto. I remember her. That girlfriend of yours got a mouth on her. Wait, before you go, eat something.” She handed him a bowl of chicken wings. “Just leave the bones and the bowl at the door when you're done. The cats'll clean it up.”