Read Online Degrees of Nakedness by Lisa Moore - Free Book Online

Barter’s Hill. Twice in the past three years cars have careened down the hill and smashed through Lar’s Fruit Store. I lie on my bed and wish for that cement truck so hard I get cross-eyed. There’s a crack in the plaster on my bedroom ceiling, coming out from the light fixture. I stare at that crack until it starts to move like a hand on a clock, around and around. Carmen’s days are numbered, like a radar scan swooping, swooping. Where are you, Carmen?
    She’s at Bar Baric. It’s Fetish Night. There’s a children’s plastic swimming pool in the corner filled with chocolate pudding.Two men will wrestle in white boxer shorts printed with little hearts. Later, two waitresses will clean the men’s bodies. On Fetish Night the barmaids wear yellowish lettuce leaves over their breasts, dangle green grapes from their nipples and spank willing customers with palm leaves.
    Carmen sings Bossa Nova. She says she had to leave Eddie to pursue her rising star. She wears a Spanish dress made of embossed leather and a black feather boa that she weasels over the paunches in the front row. You can bet Eddie is among the paunches. Some say Carmen’s power lies in the castanets. She takes a big breath and raises her arms over her head. You’d think she was going to dive off the cliffs in Acapulco while the tide was out. Then she starts. She gives them one snap and every neck in the bar twists like a wrung chicken. Those castanets are second nature to Carmen, claws on a crab. Her mother swears she could hear Carmen snapping her fingers while she was still in the womb. The first few snaps are like the hooves of bulls pawing the Formica tabletops. Then complicated rhythms squirm and writhe over each other. Carmen has the whole bar filled with black bulls in heat. Every one of those slack-jowled husbands searches for himself in the smoky, goldflecked mirror behind her. He’s searching for his own pasty face, but what he finds looking back is a matador.
    I never would have resorted to the cement trucks if other plans hadn’t failed. One night I was down at Bar Baric with a tube of crazy glue. Carmen had her back turned and in a couple of seconds, that’s all it took, I had the castanets glued together, like a couple of clam shells. She got up there, raisedher arms over her head, looked down the end of her nose, and there wasn’t a click out of her. I thought I had her. But that was the night she started playing the spoons. When she finishes her number she does this spontaneous dive from the stage. The crowd on the dance floor catches her in its arms and lifts her overhead.
    Every night they chant, “Carmen, Carmen, Carmen.” I can hear them from my bed. Her name thunders up the hills of downtown, raises the hairs on the leaves of geraniums in the windows of Gower Street, makes the light turn green at Rawlins Cross, grows softer, ticklish, near our split-level behind the Avalon Mall. But you can hear them chanting her name, even up here you can hear it, just barely, like a feather on your skin when you’re sleeping. I can see Eddie’s pink ear straining for it, straining, straining. It makes the curtain ripple against the hardwood floor as if a cat was stretching against it. I dig my fingernails into Eddie’s back. Peek-a-boo, Carmen. Come out, come out, wherever you are!
    Eddie drops off. I can’t sleep. I’m feverish. I throw off the sheets and rip open the sheers of our bedroom window. The lawns of all the houses between my house and the mall spread out before me. New frost stiffens them. Beyond is the mall parking lot. Blood rushes to my cheeks. Five gleaming cement trucks are parked there, hulking and silent under the streetlights.
    When I go to work in the morning, the red and white bellies of the trucks are already grinding hungrily, flopping over the cement inside. Their white cabs gleam like teeth. I feeldelicious shivers. I work the cash at Woolco. Mornings, the machine hums under my fingers. The register imitates