Читать книгу Man Alive - Thomas Page McBee - Страница 11

3

Oakland

April 2010 ♦ 29 years old

Somehow, despite the sweaty wool cap pulled to my eyebrows and the Carhartt jacket zipped tight across my flat chest, despite the swagger in my walk and the way I’d pitched my voice, still the hostess at the fancy Spanish place on Valencia Street had called me “ma’am.” She’d tossed the word over her shoulder like a grenade as she led Parker and me to the table by the window, and though it had been hours I ruminated darkly on every detail of my outfit: where had I gone wrong? I didn’t need her to look at my narrow face and slim frame and see a man exactly, but how could she think “woman”?

Parker was tired of this conversation. It made her antsy. She was annoyed by the late hour, now frustrated by the choice we’d made not to take a smelly cab that last mile home from the BART station, the sheen of foggy cold sticking to her face.

“I hate it here,” she announced.

“I know.” I thought of the woman’s pleased expression, how much easier it might be to live someplace that wasn’t a stronghold of lesbians with short hair and big biceps, a place where the beginnings of laugh lines or the slight flare of my hips wouldn’t tip anyone to the fact that I wasn’t a teenage boy.

A black plastic bag stuck to the chain-link fence surrounding the BART’s parking lot fluttered, its crinkle the only noise on the street. The hairs rose on my arms as a skateboarding teen rattled past us. Up ahead, a college-age woman walked alone, headphones on, easy prey.

“You think she’s going to be okay?” I asked, suspecting myself of sexism.

“As okay as anybody is,” Parker said, her look confirming it. “Let’s cross.”

We’d always head over to 41st because 40th was the dicier street, more shuttered foreclosures despite the brand-new mac-’n-cheese restaurant and fancy bike store.

Once we passed the sad donut shop in the sagging old strip mall we turned toward the single-family homes and new condos of 41st. I couldn’t shake my unease, the fog niggling its way under the collar of my flannel shirt. Balls and garden tools lay abandoned in front yards, tricycles knocked on their sides as if everybody had already fled what I was just beginning to sense.

I knew something in my body: a sharp, growing buzz. I heard him before I saw him: light footfalls, too fast.

We turned to look, like two sea birds facing a tsunami. We were all of us at the four-way stop, as he walked away from 40th and the girl I’d worried for. He wore no earphones, carried no bag. He was just a silhouette in a black hoodie under the broken streetlight. I saw his face, fleetingly, in passing—handsome, a little crazed—and then Parker and I crossed and continued up 41st, leaving him behind us.

I told myself not to be weird.

I loved Parker’s no-nonsense stride; she’d moved like that since college. She’d learned to carry a knife in her boot, to throw a punch; she prided herself on her unfailing competency, and it was all there, in that walk.

I could hear him moving in rhythm with her. Something about his gait bothered me: it was direct, too contained, too hurried for an empty street. The neighborhood sounds receded, the televisions and barking dogs. A tiny bell rang a warning: Run, it said.

I ignored it. Parker. I tried to focus, this was important. I loved her for more than the knife in her boot. I loved her for the ways she was when no one else was looking, and I wish I’d said it, I’d meant to say it, but

I was shoved, my teeth clattering,

Parker, turning toward me

hands like hot irons on my shoulders, I

flew and I was

released.