Santee Frazier

Red ambulance flicker, curbstone, wheels, a gurney. Down the breezeway a baby, crying out among the gawk-mouthed heads. Knifed, sliced, the man bleeding through the gauze and onto his belly. It reminds me of the night when my mother and I slept in our LTD while the cops surrounded our apartment complex. I remember someone standing near the yellow tape saying 2A had robbed the market across the street, that the manager was shot twice— once in the arm, once in the shoulder—and that the gunmen were held up in their apartment, squealing threats from their window. When I think of it now, the danger, the eventual gunshots echoing off gray brick, I remember the panicked yells of inquiry, a girl crying her daddy was shot. But the knifed man, now under gauze and tubing, hadn’t robbed a store, and the baby, now on its mother’s hip, was quiet and drooling. When the cops searched 2A, they found money stuffed in the couches, in posts and pans, in the pages of storybooks, and as each officer, one by one, emerged from the apartment holding pistols and rifles, my mother told me to go back to sleep. I don’t remember her carrying me to my bed, only waking the next day when the girl who cried daddy, knocked at our door, asked if I could come out and play. Now when I look at her, that same girl, with a busted eye and lip, I wonder: if when she stabbed was she stabbing the boyfriend who beat her for burning supper or was it her dad for wrenching his arm around her neck, prodding a pistol at her head on that balmy night of echo and threat. For a second I think of asking her, “Whatever happened to your dad? Is he still in jail?” But I realize it may not even be the same girl, though I want it to be. For some reason I think if she kills that man, if he bleeds to death before the ambulance can make it to the hospital, somehow the brief triumph of metal over flesh would rid my memory of the deafening crack of gunpowder, and its long shout in the night.

Only to hoot, to speak flitting blade in the dark, mouth able to sound verb for thing, him chicken eat. Not know gallop but for sound, stud but for knotting haunches, tipping its body, arching its head toward dirt. Chewing hay under a ranch that, bean-juice skin tight as saddle leather, neck stiff as a coffee can—as lanterns go out, stud fed and tied to post—Mangled piles up some hay, rests his bones for the long day of pounding tent stakes. — — — Ringmaster swigs moonshine from jar, stomps camp, looking for LuLu’s pudgy round face. Mangled wakes, remembers the switching, musky soil, the stud’s hooves sucking mud, LuLu moaning in the night. Stock of spade, thud of stakes drove in the dirt; the performers sagging in their bones, their breath spent breaking in frost-thick dawn, the trees swaying barer as the day wears on, wind carrying the red and yellow leaves across the fields. After the act, LuLu writes letters for Mangled, that he trots stud into the show, bullwhip in one hand, bridle the other. — — — She did not write about a scar that runs down his cheek, or the clown he stabbed near Tulsa. LuLu writes about his new square-toed boots and the creased-up Levi’s he bought at a mercantile in Lawrence, Kansas. She writes about his haircuts, how if he could, he would write letters himself, but signed with his throwing hand. Sometimes she reads him Westerns and Sgt. Rock comic books—she lies about what the stories say—that his skillet face ain’t so flat. — — — Him horse ride, LuLu throw with knife, fire cook meat. Him audience laugh make, headdress wear. Him horse smell snout, hooves scrape rock out, horse-apple chew hand. — — — Sundays LuLu and Mangled go to the Baptist church before the start of the show. They sing hymns, sometimes they walk down to the river with the congregation and watch the preacher dunk the pudgy babies into the bright-sparked current, Mangled thinks about the creek-bed soil, LuLu in her Sunday dress, her face painted blush, lips bright, glossy, shined for the show.