Corregidora (Bluestreak) by Gayl Jones Read Free Book Online

be so beautiful. It wasn’t him. No, not Corregidora. And my spirit, you said, like knives dancing. My veins are centuries meeting. You scratched behind my ear and drew blood and then kissed where you scratched. You can’t kiss where you scratched anymore. No, anyway, I don’t believe what Cat said your reasons are. You don’t treat love that way. When you came and heard my music you requested songs, and then when you had me alone, you requested more than my songs. I can still feel your fucking inside me. If it wasn’t for your fucking I. When do you sing the blues? Every time I ever want to cry, I sing the blues. Or would there be glasses of tears? Yes, there would be spilled glasses. I came to you, open and wounded. And you said, Sing for me, goddamn it, sing. Your plate was stained with flies, and you kept requesting songs. I sang to you out of my whole body.
    “Urs, do you remember?”
    “Yes, I remember. Who told you I was here?”
    “The girl did.”
    “I thought she would, the little bitch.”
    “If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have found you.”
    “You never lost me.”
    The shit you can dream. I struggled out of sleep. My eyes felt as tight as fists, but they opened. Light came in through the yellow shade. The shit you can dream. They say it’s what you really feel, but it ain’t what you really feel.
    I wondered if Cat was up. I got up and put on my robe. But I didn’t want to see that Jeffy if she was out there, so I sat down on the cedar chest and waited. I still felt sleepy, but I knew I couldn’t sleep. I held my arms around my belly. Then I got up and opened the door and went out in the living room. Jeffy wasn’t there. I had expected to see her in there. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was close to five o’clock. I wrapped my robe around me and stood in the living room. Then I heard Cat talking.
    “If you bother her again I’ll give you a fist to fuck.”
    “I ain’t going to bother her again.”
    “I said if you do you got my fist to fuck.”
    Then there was silence.
    “I could’ve told you she wouldn’t.”
    “What? You ask her?”
    There was a loud slap, and then low crying.
    “Laugh now.”
    “Please, Miss Catherine.”
    “I said, ‘Laugh now.’ ”
    Low crying.
    “I didn’t go in there to do it. I must’ve did it in my sleep.”
    “Shit if you did.”
    Silence.
    “Shit.”
    “I grab the shit out of you, you little nigger.”
    “Shit.”
    “Hush.”
    I had eased back to the door and by the time the “hush” came, I’d stepped back into the bedroom.
    “What is it?”
    “Hush.”
    Silence.
    I sat on the cedar chest with my robe open, then I got dressed. I think if Cat or Jeffy had come into the room then, I would’ve got evil. I would have got right evil. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it might have been because of my own fears, the things I’d thought about in the hospital, my own worries about what being with a man would be like again, and whether I really had the nerve to try. But then I just felt evil.
    I left the boxes at the foot of the bed. I put my bedclothes and cosmetics in a sack and went out the door and across the street. I’d send Tadpole for the boxes later. The front door was locked and I went up the backstairs and knocked on the door. It took him a long time to come.
    “Ursa, baby, what you doing over here? You awright?”
    “I want to come in,” I said.
    I must have been looking hateful. He asked me what was wrong.
    “A lot of shit,” I said. He’d been sleeping on the bed where I’d been sleeping when I was there. I went and sat down at the foot of the bed. He kept standing, looking at me.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, you know Jeffy stay over there.”
    “Yeah.”
    I didn’t say what I was going to. “She just stay over there. I’m taking up Jeffy’s space.”
    “That ain’t why you here,” he said.
    I started to tell him, but didn’t. I only told him about Jeffy in the bed, feeling all on my breasts. I