Shadow Prey

up. And in his hand, the razor-edged stone knife . . .
    An hour later, in a truck stop off I-35 north of Oklahoma City, Leo Clark sat at the wheel of his car and wept.
     
    Shadow Love walked into the wind, his shoulders hunched, his running shoes crunching through the fallen maple leaves. The black spot floated out ahead of him.
    The black spot.
    When Shadow Love was a child, his mother had taken him to a neighbor’s home. The house smelled of cooking gas and boiled greens, and he could remember the neighbor’s fat white legs as she sat on a kitchen table, sobbing. Her husband had a black spot on his lungs. The size of a dime. Nothing to be done, the woman said. Make him comfortable, the doctors said. Shadow Love remembered his mother, gripping the other woman around the shoulders . . . .
    And now he had a name for the thing on his mind. The black spot.
    Sometimes the invisible people would talk to his mother, plucking at her arms and face and her dress and even her shoes, to get her attention, to tell her what Shadow Love had done. He couldn’t remember doing all those things, but the invisible people said he had. They were never wrong, Rosie Love said. They saw everything, knew everything. His mother would beat him with a broom handle for doing those things. She would chase him and pound him on the back, the shoulders, the legs. Afterward, when the invisible people had gone, she would fall on him weeping, begging forgiveness, trying to rub off the bruises as if they were shoe polish . . . .
    The black spot had come with the invisible people. When Shadow Love got angry, the black spot popped up in front of his eyes, a hole in the world. He never told his mother about the black spot: she would tell the invisible people and they would demand a punishment. And he never showed his anger, for the same reason. Defiance was the worst of all sins, and the invisible people would howl for his blood.
    At some point, the invisible people stopped coming. His mother killed them with alcohol, Shadow Love thought. Her bouts of drunkenness were bad enough, but nowhere near as bad as the invisible people. Although the invisible people were gone, the black spot stayed . . . .
    And now it floated in front of his eyes. The fuckin’ cop. Davenport. He treated them like dirt. He came in and pointed his finger. Made them sit. Like a trained dog. Sit, he said. Speak, he said. Arf.
    The black spot grew and Shadow Love felt dizzy with the humiliation of it. Like a dog. His pace picked up, until he was almost running; then he slowed again, threw his head back and groaned, aloud. Fuckin’ dog. He balled a fist and hit himself on the cheekbone, hard. The pain cut through his anger. The black spot shrank.
    Like a fuckin’ dog, you crawled like a fuckin’ dog.  . . .
    Shadow Love was not dumb. His fathers were running their war and would need him. He couldn’t be taken by the cops, not for something as stupid as a fistfight. But it ate at him, the way Davenport had treated him. Made him be nice  . . .
    Shadow Love bought a pistol from a teenaged burglar. It wasn’t much of a gun, but he didn’t need much of a gun. He gave the kid twenty bucks, slipped the pistol into his waistband and headed back to the Point. He would need a new place to stay, he thought. He couldn’t move in with his fathers: they were already jammed into a tiny efficiency. Besides, they didn’t want him in their war.
    A place to stay. The last time he was in town, he’d have gone to Ray Cuervo . . . .
     
    Yellow Hand’s day had been miserable. Davenport had started it, kicking him out of a stupor. A stupor he’d valued. The longer he was asleep, the longer he could put off his problem. Yellow Hand needed his crack. He rolled his upper lip and bit it, thinking about the rush . . . .
    After Davenport had gone, Shadow Love had put on his boots and jacket and left without a word. The old white woman had fallen back on her mattress and soon was snoring away with her man, who had never woken up. YellowHand had made it out on the street a half-hour later. He’d cruised the local K Mart, but left with the feeling he was being watched. It was the same way at a Target store. Nothing obvious, just white guys in rayon neckties . . .
    He wished Gineele and Howdy were still in town. If Gineele and Howdy hadn’t gone to Florida, they’d all be rich.
    Gineele was very black. When she was working, she wore her hair in corn rows and sported