When she stares, I think, She sees me for who I really am. But then I realize she’s staring at the air, a place between us, and I think, Yes, if we both stare at the same place at the same time, we’ll see him there. But she looks at the bottle again, her loose change on the bar, her own two hands.

Tonight I didn’t see Simone. Tonight I danced. Once I was a pretty girl. Like Noelle, shining in her pale skin. It’s not vain to say I was like that. I’m thirty-seven now, already old. Some women go to loose flesh, some to hard bone. I’m all edges from years living on whiskey and smoke.

But I can still fool men in these dim bars. I can fix myself up, curl my hair, paint my mouth. I have a beautiful blue dress, a bra with wires in the cups. I dance all night. I spin like Noelle; I shine, all sweat and blush and will.

Hours later, in my trailer, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. The stranger I’m with doesn’t care how I look: he only wants me to keep moving in the dark.

Drifters, liars — men who don’t ask questions, men with tattoos and scars, men just busted out, men on parole; men with guns in their pockets, secrets of their own; men who can’t love me, who don’t pretend, who never want to stay too long: these men leave spaces, nights between that Vincent fills. He opens me. I’m the ground. Dirt and stone. He digs at me with both hands. He wants to lie down.

Or it’s the other way around. It’s winter. It’s cold. I’m alone in the woods with my father’s gun. I’ll freeze. I’ll starve. I look for rabbits, pray for deer. I try to cut a hole in the frozen earth, but it’s too hard.

It’s a bear I have to kill, a body I have to open if I want to stay warm. I have to live in him forever, hidden in his fur, down deep in the smell of bear stomach and bear heart. We lumber through the woods like this. I’ve lost my human voice. Nobody but the bear understands me now.

Last week my lover was a white man with black stripes tattooed across his back. His left arm was withered. Useless, he told me. Shrapnel, Dak To.

He was a small man, thin, but heavier than you’d expect.

He had a smooth stone in his pocket, three dollars in his hatband, the queen of spades in his boot. He said, She brings me luck.

He showed me the jagged purple scar above one kidney, told the story of a knife that couldn’t kill.

The week before, my lover was bald and pale, his fingers thick. He spoke Latin in his sleep; he touched my mouth.

It’s always like this. It’s always Vincent coming to me through them.

This bald one said he loaded wounded men into helicopters, medevacs in Song Be and Dalat. Sometimes he rode with them. One time all of them were dead.

He was inside me when he told me that.

He robbed a convenience store in Seattle, a liquor store in Spokane. He did time in Walla Walla. I heard his switchblade spring and click. Felt it at my throat before I saw it flash.

He said, They say I killed a man.

He said, But I saved more than that.

He had two daughters, a wife somewhere. They didn’t want him back.

The cool knife still pressed my neck. He said, I’m innocent.

I have nothing to lose. Nothing precious for a lover to steal — no ruby earrings, no silver candlesticks.

In my refrigerator he’ll find Tabasco sauce and mayonnaise, six eggs, a dozen beers.

In ray freezer, vodka, a bottle so cold it burns your hands.

In my cupboard, salted peanuts, crackers shaped like little fish, a jar of sugar, an empty tin.

In my closet, the blue dress that fooled him.

If my lover is lucky, maybe I’ll still have yesterday’s tips.

When he kisses me on the steps, I’ll know that’s my thirty-four dollars bulging in his pocket. I’ll know I won’t see him again.

He never takes the keys to my car. It’s old, too easily trapped.

But tonight I have no lover. Tonight I danced in Paradise with a black-haired man. I clutched his coarse braid. All these years and I still wanted it. He pulled me close so I could feel the knife in his pocket. He said, Remember, I have this.

I don’t know if he said the words out loud or if they were in my head.

When I closed my eyes I thought he could be that boy, the one who blew himself into the sky, whose body fell down in pieces thin and white as ash and bread, the one who rose up whole and dripping, who slipped his tongue in my mouth, his hands down my pants.

He could have been that boy grown to a man.

But when I opened my eyes I thought, No, that boy is dead.

Later we were laughing, licking salt, shooting tequila. We kissed, our mouths sour with lime. He said we could go out back. He said if I had a dollar he’d pay the man. I gave him five, and he said we could stay the week for that. I kissed him one more time, light and quick. I said I had to use the ladies’ room.

Lady? he said, and he laughed.

I decided then. He was that boy, just like him. I said, Sit tight, baby, I’ll be right back. He put his hand on my hip. Don’t make me wait, he said.

I stepped outside, took my car, drove fast.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not too good for Niles Yellow Dog or any man. I’m not too clean to spend the night at that hotel. It wouldn’t be the first time I passed out on a back seat somewhere, hot and drunk under someone’s shadow, wrapped tight in a man’s brown skin.

But tonight I couldn’t do it. Tonight I came here, to my father’s house, instead. Tonight I watch him.

He’s stopped moving now. He’s in the chair. There’s one light on, above his head. I can’t help myself: I drink the whiskey I keep stashed. It stings my lips and throat, burns inside my chest. But even this can’t last.

I don’t believe in forgiveness for some crimes. I don’t believe confessions to God can save the soul or raise the dead. Some bodies are never whole again.

I cannot open the veins of my father’s heart.

I cannot heal his lungs or mend his bones.

Tonight I believe only this: we should have gone back. We should have crawled through the grass until we found that man.

If Vincent Blew had one more breath, I should have lain down beside him — so he wouldn’t be cold, so he wouldn’t be scared.

If Vincent Blew was dead, we should have dug the hard ground with our bare hands. I should have become the dirt if he asked. Then my father could have walked away, free of my burden, carrying only his own heart and the memory of our bones, a small bag of sticks light enough to lift with one hand.

LITTLE WHITE SISTER

MAMA WARNED ME, stay away from white girls. Once I didn’t. So, thirty years too late, I’m minding my mama. That’s how it happened.

I saw her. Flurries that night and she’s running, barelegged, wearing almost nothing at all, and the snow’s rising up in funnels, like ghosts, spinning across the street till they whip themselves against the bricks, and I’m thinking, Crazy white girl don’t know enough to come in from the cold.

Crackhead most likely, not feeling the wind. I’d seen the abandoned car at the end of the block, ten days now, shooting gallery on wheels, going nowhere. One of them, I told myself, pissed at her boyfriend or so high she thinks her skin is burning off her. Most times crackheads don’t know where they are. Like last week. Girl comes pounding on my door. White girl. Could’ve been the same one. Says she’s looking for Lenny. Says she was here with him last night. And I say, Lenny ain’t here, and she says, Let me in. I don’t like arguing with a white girl in my hallway, so I let her in. I say, Look around. She says, Shit — this isn’t even the right place. She says, What’re you tryin’ to pull here, buddy? And I back away, I say, Get out of here. I say, I don’t want no trouble, and she says, Damn straight you don’t want no trouble. Then she’s gone but I’m thinking, You can be in it that fast and it’s nothing you did, it’s just something that happens.