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Shooting

Lilia Yuknavitch

She pulls up to a stop sign like blood throb. Says motherfucker. She can feel like a bruised shoulder that she has a flat. She can feel like a left leaded arm that she has a flat. She can feel front left. She wheels it over the curb. Crippled like that. Her jaw aches. Her left eye twitches.
     Fucking jack. Fucking spare. Fucking tire iron. Truncated lines stack themselves in her skull like that. The line "ten years." The line "suffering makes us stronger." She sets up the metal that will fix her, there on the road's shoulder. It makes a cross. She can't not look at it as a cross. The line "recovering catholic." This makes her laugh. Then she thinks "jesus christ," then "god damn it."
     First crank. The muscle in her right arm pops up, ready. The chords in her neck tighten. Her left arm dulls over; memory. Year one. Face a little off of the pavement. Skin, she thinks. Up close like this the road looks like bumpy, black, magnified skin. She laughs hysterically until the traffic light changes and he has grabbed her by the scruff--collar--something and yanked her back into the car. She still has vomit smear around her mouth and she continues to laugh her ass off. Seven hundred dollars, he says, you can't just carry your money around in your pockets like that. He says, look at it, it nearly fell out of your shirt pocket into the street there, it's got barf on it, for christ's sake, then where would you be? Jesus. She's still laughing. She can't help it.
     At the next light she opens the door and leans out again to puke, or laugh, or ride.
 
Year two. I'll pay you two hundred fucking dollars to kiss that guy on the mouth. She's waving the cash in one hand like a gray-green fan, steering with the other. Her lover and some guy they picked up on the side of the road. She's bored. They've been driving for two hours in some shit-sack place in Texas. Flat flat flat fuck this state she is thinking. Pancake flat. Hand splat on pavement flat. She nearly distracts herself right out of the car thinking lines. Where do you come up with this shit, he asks, to which she replies, with tongue. The two men look at each other innocently. They are high. Childlike. They are more beautiful than is humanly, manly possible. She wants it. She wants his mouth on his mouth in her rear view. She wants man on man wet like that. She pulls the car over into dirt and scrub and the lost dry heat of endless sky. She gets out of the car. Her boots crunch-print. She makes tracks on that land. She leans against the red metal smooth as a drive-in movie. She smokes. She waits for them. She waits for them to meet a woman with a want bigger than Texas. Her cunt throbs. Spit fills her mouth. The crook of her left arm begs. She squeezes it there hard enough to leave red prints.
     Yes, they do. Then they split her money. Then they all fix there in the shade of the open trunk, wide open as a mouth. Then her eyes wild like fire. Then closed. Her arm lax. Her mouth opening. Her desire a flooded desert. Smile float teeth vertebrae melt.
 
Year three. They do not speak of it except to call it "the incident." The incident starts out around nine p.m. which is nine p.m. exactly the same as any other night. She is at a bar which is known to him, as her body is known to him, her mind, her movements, even her mindless desires. Shooting around like marbles. Blue quickening. At nine p.m. he is understanding that their arguments leave a mark. A sting over his heart, a scar, something. He places his hand there. Over his heart. Nothing nothing nothing beats back at him. Dull thudding. Even though he doesn't know for sure where she is he knows she is at this bar.
     He is right.
     As he walks in he is mesmerized by the smell and the dark and the red vinyl and the sticky black linoleum floor and the regulars and the band setting up and her hair, hanging behind her, blonde mess. Each step he takes is his memory flashing an image at a time. His footsteps in his eyes walking up his own driveway. The windows of the car fogged up. The car seeming to move there in the driveway. His heart seizing. His anger welling up in his veins. He knows but doesn't; then does again. He opens the car door. A man is fixing her, but he is also fucking her, his dick is already sliding into her smooth as a needle into its waiting. The next image happens when he blinks, breaks the motion of things, his eyelids moving in slow motion, following his feet, dumb. He is grabbing the guy by the hair and yanking him out of the car. Another blink. Walking across the floor of a bar is exactly the same as walking across their front lawn. Stepping closer to her hair. Blonde mess. Grabbing her left arm. The needle ripping across her upturned flesh, ripping a second mouth open in the pale and infant-thin skin. Step and blink. Blonde mess. Her hair. The smell of her cunt, of her cum, of his. He feels as though he might vomit walking across the floor of the bar where she is sitting, all hair, all that blonde. Walking the play-by-play. She is laughing. But there is blood coming from her arm. Her left arm the bruise her left arm the poem her left arm their fucked-up love. Emergency. Emergency room. Blonde mess. Her blood cleaned up and put back into her, their love put back into her, her arm sutured, bandaged.
     He is on her. His hand there in the bar. On her shoulder. Her hair. She spins a bit, then stops, since she knows it's him. Then she looks at the bar mirror which is him. They look at each other like that for a long minute. Then she pitches her drink in his face and leaves. It is unbelievably over dramatic. The words "hyperbole pick-up-sticks-fuck" knock around in her skull like dice in a cup in her leaving, though he doesn't know this precisely. He knows this dully.
     He lets her.
     He knows where she will go next. Her bandaged arm dangles from her shoulder like some new punctuation of a body.
     She will go to a dance club next.
     She does.
     He finds her there hours later. She is dance-humping a woman with whom she has been lovers in their past. She is in full motion, sweat, pounding of sound, bodies beating each other for all they are worth. She is deaf with desire and wet movement. She is a blur. She is a smudge. She is smudging herself into moving particles, physics.
     Someone outside of this motion grabs her arm in a sharp interruption. She knows the hand like the back of her hand. She is spun round to face him, and his face, and his ripping out of the room and outside, and her chasing him, and their yelling in a parking lot, and her pounding the metal of the car, and his throwing her against it, and his getting in to drive away from her, and her opening the passenger side door, and his yanking it closed against her, and her arm breaking there, blue, red, bone, her arm in the door, her arm their life, her bandaged arm shattering like sticks.
 
Year four. Road tripping. Somewhere near the coast. A roadside park. Redwoods and tree needles and California has a smell. Cooking up mushrooms in a cup-a-soup at a picnic table. Cross-country. Crossing country. Land masses. Flight. Then their bodies begin to numb, they yawn, they laugh, colors change shape and little vague star-shapes clatter at the edge of their vision. They see three things.
     A man who is drunk climbing up the side of the embankment there at the roadside park. He has a rainbow colored, crocheted hat on, rasta, and he has a sleeveless white t-shirt on, and he has on khaki colored shorts, and he seems like a cartoon of some sort. He has a long black pony-tail and pockmarked skin. He looks a hundred years older than he is. He climbs like some animal, gets very far up the hill. Pulling on shrubs and branches and shit. They are mesmerized. The man getting smaller and smaller up the hill like that. It is easy to be hypnotized by this. She laughs smally. Under her breath almost. He puts his hand under her shirt. Cups her breast, then puts her tit between his thumb and forefinger. It feels to him like a ball bearing. He has no idea. Then the man loses his grip and tumbles slow motion Technicolor back down the hill, head over heels, all the way to the road where he lands with this weird splat noise. Or bone crash. Or something. Everyone, which is just the three of them, keeps still for about a minute. Then he gets up, the man stands and walks away like it's all the most normal thing in the universe.
     They get their mountain bikes out and decide it is an excellent plan to ride them onto the freeway. On the freeway they see many colors shooting by like molecules, or corpuscles, or DNA strands.
     After several hours and some food and some whiskey and an attempt at fucking that turns into a nap they come back to themselves. They get back into the car and drive. They play THE DOORS on the car CD player louder than shit. She is laughing. She has whiskey all over her body. She always was clumsy. Like a kid. They come around a little California coast turn in the road and everything stops. Cars ahead of them with their brake lights on like little beady animal eyes all in a row. There is an accident. They see the ambulance. They see guys with uniforms carrying a stretcher. They see broken glass scattered and smashed metal like a disgruntled face. They see a guy on the stretcher. His skin is more pale than 2% milk. He has an institutionally beige big neck brace on. There is blood and something the color of iodine all over him. His mouth, his eyes, have gone slack. As if everything had been driven out of him. His arm dangles off of one side of the stretcher. It looks bigger than it should. Like a crab claw. Jim Morrison belts it out. He feels he might pass out. She is laughing like a deer caught in the headlights. He wants to clock her one, but doesn't, instead he drives them slow as blood beyond this scene.
     When they can see the ocean again, he says what the fuck are you laughing at? How is that funny? She says did you see his ribs? I swear to god they looked like they had exploded out of his chest and broken into wings, did you fucking see that? Glorious. And her head rocks back. And her eyes closed. And her needing to say that. And her terrible beauty.
 
Year five.
As you know incarcerations.
As you know the roof of your own mouth.
As you know the fingers you use to touch yourself.
As you know what hurts and what you want to hurt toward pleasure.
As you know the stupid line that does not exist there.
As you know the spit in your mouth.
As you know going down on a woman. Age ten. Age twenty. Age thirty.
As you know his mouth will never be her mouth.
As you know his taste will never be hers.
As you know your teeth clenching, wishing, wanting, biting.
As you know driving a car very fast is the same as living a life.
As you know the scars you carry.
As you read the Braille of your own body, self inscription.
As you know the scripts we are given fold in on themselves: this is a woman.
As you know single malt scotch pooling in your mouth better than saliva.
As you know the word "want" as an entire lexicon.
As you know the weight of your left arm, the pull, the mastery of your right hand, the tubing in your teeth, the skill of your fingers at work, the flesh taking the stab, the vein pulsing toward rupture, the breathing jack-knifing in lungs, the cold air rushing up your throat, your skull, the sockets of your eyes, you nearly swallowing your own teeth, my god, the knowing, the rain let loose to pure body, her knowing, the first shot received as a child, the not crying, the fascination, the looking up with the eyes of a child at a beautiful man in white, his giving.
This is what a woman wants. This is wanting. Be good.
As you know sentences will fail.
As you know to take a needle and cum.
From that.
Need driving you.
Shooting.
 
Year six. Motherfucker. Mother. Fucker. The phrase, "detox for recovering catholics." She laughs and laughs. They have given her a roommate with red hair. She wants her. She watches her in her sleep and masturbates under white sheets. Her hands alive and unflinching. The red headed woman becomes her need. Her drive. She lunges, propels herself across their room, over linoleum and white, over sterile and clean too clean shock backed floors and walls.
     Turns out the redhead is awake. Sweating. Corpse-like in a pool of herself. Breathing in rapid bursts. Her hands on fire or maybe just screaming. Her hair, screaming.
     They nearly devour each other like animals locked up.
     Next day they sit semi-circle with other women, black circles under every eye. Most are smoking. Legs thrown out in front of them at odd angles. Mouths, eyes, all saying resist resist resist. Hearts saying fuck you fuck you fuck you fast or slow.
     She thinks god damn it, then lines that mimic that phrase, such as dogs have it, go bang it, fuck bag it, gun big it. She laughs. Is there something funny, L? Did you have something to say? Do you think maybe laughter is your cover story? Huh? Let's hear about it. C'mon. Show us some guts. Take a risk for once in your life. Tell us something we don't know. You mad? You got some rage in you that you think is special? A counselor tries to draw her out.
     Cunt throb it.
     Hand ram it.
     Lead blood it.
     God damn it.
     She is forced to stay an extra four months for carving the line "god damn it" into her arm with a sharpened and sharpened pencil.
 
The lost year. She is in the parking lot of Our Lady of Little Flowers Church. She is sitting there dull and blood. She is there for a commitment ceremony. He asked, what's a commitment ceremony. She called him a dumb fuck. It's when two queer people want to love each other in public, motherfucker. He didn't say anything, then did. She'd been clean nine months. Does it mess with you? What. That she's marrying someone else. Someone not you. Or that you married me. Is that it? Was that it? Did that make you feel incarcerated or something?
     All she hears in her head is blood pounding god damn it god damn it god damn it driving her crazy, making her brain propel itself down the rivers of her body into the veins in her arm into lines like what is a woman what is a woman what is fuck.
 
Year eight. She is driving in the desert. For all she is worth. With her whole body. Her mine gone wild. Her hair like fire. Her cells dividing or raging. It could be rage or love or just plain need. She drives most of the year. Or at least it seems that way. That driving. Those tracks.
 
Year nine. To cause to be projected, to cause to fire, to kill by doing this, to wound by doing this, to put to death with a bullet as a punishment, to hunt, usually used with "away," "down," "out" or "off," to destroy or move with a projectile. To go quickly through, under, or over. To project something forward, out, towards. To direct with the rapidity of a moving bullet. To streak with another color or colors. To send down a chute. To drive in the direction of something. To put into action. To detonate. To photograph. To take the attitude of. To play. To arrive with great speed like a moving projectile, to grow quickly. To jut out. To propel. To increase in speed. To flash across the sky. To dart painfully in or through a part or parts of the body.
 
Ten years. On the road's shoulder. One moment. Flat tire. Thought-fucked. Her arms changing a tire on an ordinary car. Then into her vision comes taillights and somebody pulling over. Was it her hair that drew them, driving out in blonde tracks against the sky? It is a man, she thinks, and then a beautiful man, his hair long and wind-blown, a man gets out of his car and from the knee down his legs get bigger and bigger. When he is a foot away from her he stops. Then and only then she looks up. Up from the black leather boot to the bottom cuff of his jeans up his shin to his knee to his thigh up his denim to his cock. Then up his belly his torso his collarbone she pictures under his t-shirt his jaw his mouth his eyes. His whole face. Then his lips. They could be anyone's lips. They could be hers.
     "It looks like you could use" is all she hears.
     She lets this man help her even though she doesn't need. His arms working are more beautiful than is humanly, manly possible. His hands. His arms. The insides of his arms. Then and only then she thinks: I remember the veins in his arms more clearly than his face.
     When he is finished he says the line "do you want to score."
     Then and only then it hits her. Shoots through her. The past wants. Like the mouth salivating. Like the cunt begging. Like the weight of an arm. Like the next sentence. Like a faith that won't be arrested. The past breaks her body no matter what, moves her, projects her, propels her, speeds her. The past's needing. No stopping it. The past drives her open, unendingly, like

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