Rhode Island Red by Charlotte Carter Page A

a real provider, and she figured, correctly, that I was going to require a fair amount of being provided for. I glanced over at him from time to time while I cleaned up in the kitchen. I didn’t know how to begin to tell him about all the things that had happened to me in the past few weeks. Especially about Henry. So I put it all away for the night.
    I set a bowl of popcorn in front of him, the kind with fake red pepper sprinkled on it, his favorite. He looked up briefly and laid an appreciative hand on my butt for a minute before turning back to the game.
    â€œI’m whipped, Walter,” I said. “Going to bed.”
    â€œI work all day but you’re whipped. Nobody like you, Nan.”
    I sat up in bed thinking about the dark green sheets on Henry’s bed, about the frantic swiftness of Wild Bill’s gait, about the feel of that gun on my skin, and about a terrified young Dominican enunciating the goofy words of a country and western song.
    What had I really done to Diego’s words?
    Had I massaged them into the phrase Rhode Island Red? Or translated them? Or debauched them? I had put the phrase together. Diego had not.
    But I was a translator. I knew that words lie.
    After all, take Verlaine.
    Je suis un berceau
    Qu’une main balance
    Au creux d’un caveau …
    Some have said this means:
    I am a cradle being rocked
    by a hand in the
    center of a crypt …
    But someone else maintains it means:
    Deep in the hollow earth
    my childhood is ravaged by
    a fist
…
    Ask Verlaine which is closer to the truth.
    But Verlaine is long dead.
    Diego, however, wasn’t. Maybe if he were presented with those very words, they’d mean something to him.
    They had meant something to Charlie Conlin and to Inge. I was fairly certain the two of them had died because of those words.
    I heard a muffled cheer from the next room. Somebody must have made a basket or something.
    It was only a little after noon, but the day was over for the bulk of the workers in the flower district. Their shift began at three or four in the morning. I looked up and down the cramped streets with their double rows of potted plants squeezing the pedestrians into single file, and I wondered where the workers ate their lunch at, say, 6.30 A.M. What would you have for lunch at six-thirty in the morning? There had been this guy, Dale, a fellow grad school student, who liked prowling the streets at all hours of the morning. He used to take me into these funky coffee shops—places where the transsexuals were the respectable folks and the rest of the patrons went down the social ladder from there—where he would down gallons of shitty coffee and natter at me in that sincere Marxist way of his about the hidden injuries of race and class. I sometimes thought he got off on people assuming I was a hooker.
    What made me think of that? I was wasting time. I was stalling, postponing my entrance into the wholesale market where Diego worked. But I picked up my feet and walked toward the place.
    I evoked a couple of half-hearted lewd remarks from the guys lounging outside the front door. Ignoring them, I looked up at the window of the apartment where Inge had died.
    An old man was slowly squeegee-ing a sheet metal table on which a million flowers had been trimmed. Wet leaves and petals clung to his trouser legs like appliqué.
    â€œIs Diego here?” I asked him.
    He gestured to the rear of the room. I walked through a set of swinging doors and into a dingy room with nine lockers nailed against one wall. In front of them was a long wooden bench where Diego sat lacing up his sneakers. Beside him was an open beer can in a paper bag and a cigarette left burning at the edge of the seat.
    I called his name.
    The boy looked up dumbly.
    â€œDiego?” I called again.
    It took a full thirty seconds for him to react, and when he did he only heaved a tremendous sigh. Diego was good and high.
    â€œDo you remember me?”
    He