Body and Bread by Nan Cuba Page B

my brother.
    Sam touched the arm, which rested on the chest. He tapped the skin in several places—firm as an orange peel. But its color was brown; even the fingernails had a tinge like muddy water. The man’s eyes had sunk in their sockets, so Sam pulled a lid back until the black center, surrounded by its wrinkled, murky white, bulged. He turned the lid loose, and it fell, sleepily, to its original position. Touching, poking, he examined the man’s ear and teeth; he even pulled lightly on the hair. Then he placed one of his hands back on the elbow and with the other, he tugged on the wrist. After several light jerks, he shifted his right hand to the man’s waist, and with his left, he pulled hard on the forearm. Smoothly, as though sweeping through water, the contorted limb straightened. Sam rested it on the plank, and while he still held it, he stood there, nodding, gazing, nodding.
    Here, I thought, in a place where everybody else hacked things apart, Sam pulls the body back together.
    I remembered my mother describing Otis’ curled body as looking like a chicken. Terrible , I thought. I heard him say, “…the best friend I had or would ever have on earth was dying,” and I pictured him tracing a giant S in the air. He’s gone , I thought selfishly, but I couldn’t explain the emptiness.
    “Hey, look,” Sam said as he prodded just below the man’s shoulder. “A tattoo.”
    A faded blue drawing of a hand holding a hoop with two keys draped across sagging muscle. The keys were the giant kind used for ancient locks. The hand, gripping the ring, curled into a fist.
    “I don’t like it,” I said, tightening my chin, missing Otis: no more lessons about banana-peel starfish, and except for Sam, only my parents and people like them.
    “He’s a convict,” Sam said. “The color’s not right. See?” He rubbed at an obvious change in the tattoo’s shading. “This father of a kid I know says they melt checkers or Bible pages for ink and can draw good but the color’s never even.”
    “What’d he do?”
    “Something bad, murder most probably.”
    I focused on his hand, the hair dark at the base of the fingers. “You think he had kids?”
    “Maybe. A couple’d be about right.” Sam took off his cap, ran his fingers across his stubble-cut hair. His biceps twitched; a whiff of sweat and orange soda hit me.
    “Uh-huh. And one of them was kind of bad too, but his mom helped him all she could.” I was thinking about how when he talked back to my mother, my father got so mad, sometimes he spanked Sam. My father was sad afterwards, but Sam never cried.
    Sam stood close, his arm rubbing me whenever he moved. Each brush prickled, like something visceral moving through my pores, my blood.
    He pulled on the tattoo again. “I don’t think this is how the poor guy expected to get out.” His gaze moved to the man’s face, then the chest, the fists. With a hand on each side of the head, Sam gently turned it, facing it forward. But the cheek and mouth stayed crooked, so he tried smoothing the skin with his thumb; then, with his fingers, he worked the lips, touching them until the features softened, resting.
    The dead man’s hand lay across his thigh, the fingers slightly separated; the last nail, longer than the others, curved inward as though searching. Black hair swirled from under his breasts, across his stomach, finally thickening, soft and twining, at the nest of skin and parts between his legs. His penis had gauzy veins and a mushroom cap; it nestled against a divided sack covered in velvet. The area, with its shadows and central organ, signified earth shoots, fungus emitting spores like smoke.
    I longed to touch such a place, to test the suppleness and tension there, to know, finally, my mother’s most forbidden secret. I lifted my hand, but couldn’t bring myself to place it on the dead man. Instead, without looking at Sam’s face, I leaned my cheek against his chest, rested my fingers on the bulge in