Second Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

be flung into the relief of freezing water like an old woman submerged and screaming in the wild balm of some dark baptismal rite in a roaring river. But I was holding on. While the punctures were marching across, burning their open pinprick way across my chest, I was bulging in every muscle, slick, strained, and the bat was peering into my mouth of pain, kicking, slick with my saliva, and in the stuffed interior of my brain I was resisting, jerking in outraged helplessness, blind and baffled, sick with the sudden recall of what Tremlow had done to me that night—helpless abomination—while Sonny lay sprawled on the bridge and the captain trembled on his cot behind the pilothouse. There were tiny fat glistening tears in the corners of my eyes. But they never fell. Never from the eyes of this heavy bald-headed once-handsome man. Victim. Courageous victim.
    The buzzing stopped. I waited. But the fierce oaf was whistling and I heard the click, the clasp of Cassandra’s purse—empty as I thought except for a worn ten dollar bill which she was drawing forth, handing across to him—and I found that the bat was dead, that I was able to see through the sad film over my eyes and that the pain was only a florid swelling already motionless, inactive, the mere receding welt of this operation. I could bear it. Marked and naked as I was, I smiled. I managed to stand.
    Cassandra glanced at my chest—at what to me was still a mystery-glanced and nodded her small classical indomitable head.Then the tatooer took a square dirty mirror off the wall, held it in front of me:
    “Have a look. Skipper,” once more sitting on the edge of the table, eager, bulking, swinging a leg.
    So I looked into the mirror, the dirty fairy tale glass he was about to snap in his two great hands, and saw myself. The pink was blistered, wet where he had scrubbed it again with the cooling and dizzying alcohol, but the raised letters of the name—upside down and backwards—were a thick bright green, a string of inflamed emeralds, a row of unnatural dots of jade. Slowly, trying to appear pleased, trying to smile, I read the large unhealed green name framed in the glass above the ashamed blind eye of my own nipple:
Fernandez.
And I could only try to steady my knees, control my breath, hide feebly this green lizard that lay exposed and crawling on my breast.
    Finally I was able to speak to her, faintly, faintly: “Sonny and Pixie are waiting for us, Cassandra,” as I saw with shame and alarm that her eyes were harder than ever and had turned a bright new triumphant color.
    “Pixie and I been worried about you. You going to miss that bus if you two keep running off this way. But come on. Skipper, we got time for one more round of rum and coke!”
    With fondness, a new white preening of the neck, an altered line at the mouth, a clear light of reserved motherhood in the eye, Cassandra glanced at the little girl on Sonny’s lap and then smoothed her frock—this the most magical, envied, deferential gesture of the back of the tiny white hand that never moved, never came to life except to excite the whole ladylike sense of modesty—and slid with the composure of the young swan into the dark blistered booth opposite the black-skinned petty officer and platinum child. I took my place beside her, squeezing, sighing, worrying, aware of my burning chest and the new color of her eyes and feeling her withdrawing slightly, making unnecessary room for me, curving away from me in all the triumph and gentleness of her disdain. I fished into a tight pocket, wiped my brow. Once more there was the smoke, the noise, the sick heavinessof our water front café, our jumping-off night in Chinatown, once more the smell of whisky and the sticky surface of tin trays painted with pagodas and golden monsters, and now the four of us together—soon to part, three to take their leave of poor black faithful Sonny—and now the terrible mammalian concussion of Kate Smith singing to all the