“Oh, baby. That’s your daddy,” Grandma says.
“Why didn’t Pop come back?” I ask.
“Some things are not to know, baby. I didn’t have a daddy around growing up. And your daddy didn’t neither. There’s no mystery to that.”
I study Grandma. I watch her close for hints and clues. She knows things she doesn’t tell.
“I don’t mean now. I mean then. When he called, he said he’d be there. He said he was on his way.”
Grandma coughs and reaches for the contribution by her bed. Then she reaches for me and gives me a long hug.
“He said: ‘Don’t tell your mother. I’m coming to take you all home,’” I say. “And I didn’t tell.”
Grandma keeps holding on like she can wrap her arms around the words I’m saying and make them disappear. She rocks me back and forth; my head’s on her shoulder. She strokes my hair along my back. She starts to hum.
“Your daddy could find his way around anyplace. Did you know that? He made maps but that was for other folks. Lord, have mercy. I remember the time I took him and your Aunt Loretta out to the campgrounds with the church. He was seven years old. Not two minutes into being there had he done run off. He was looking for the horses he’d seen on the road coming in. It was the dead of night before he come back to find us. Him finding us! Not afraid of the dark. Not afraid of being lost. He walked up to the campfire like he was walking into that very living room there,” she says and points. “And he said: Mama, they let me feed that horse. What a whipping he got that night,” she says and laughs.
“What I’m saying, baby, is that your daddy could find whatever he’s looking for. He knows how. Some thing’s best not found.”
Grandma holds me tighter then like she wants to keep all my questions inside.
“Your daddy, Rachel. Bury him, baby. In your heart, and your mind. It’s no point — the holding on.”
Her voice is so soft it’s like she’s whispering this to herself.
“But, what if he was on his way when he said?”
“No more questions.”
“But, what if he did come?”
“Oh baby, he did. He just came too late that day.”
Rachel
“You smell like marzipan,” Jesse says when he shakes my hand hello.
It’s my first day as an intern at the Salvation Army Harbor Lights Center. I’m wearing a blazer, a button-down silk shirt, a skirt, and high-heeled shoes like Aunt Loretta used to wear.
“Jesse’s our other intern,” Drew says. “Rachel’s my surrogate niece, but really like a daughter to me.”
Again he says it — “like a daughter” — the way he did that day. This time it sounds like a warning in secret code.
Jesse is tall and made of right angles only. He has a square jaw and a sharp clean line for a nose. He has blond hair and sea green eyes. “You smell like marzipan” isn’t a common thing to say when you meet someone.
“Hi,” I say. “Marzipan was one of my favorite things when I was a kid.”
“Me too. My mom — she’s from Norway — she used to make it when I was little,” Jesse says.
“From there as in from there?” I ask. “From just outside Oslo.”
“Drew, did you know that?” I ask. “I didn’t,” he says. “But I don’t come in here smelling like marzipan either.” Drew laughs. For a moment I think Drew has been paying attention to me, to the way I look, to the perfume I’m wearing, to the way that I am not his daughter.
“My mom was Danish,” I say.
“Really?”
His “really” feels like a challenge for some reason, and I find sounds within me I have not used in years: “Taler du norsk?”
“I’m fine. Wait — how do you say that again? I am fine.”
“In Danish you say, ‘Jeg har det godt.’” Where have these sounds come from?
“You speak Norwegian too?” Jesse asks.
“I think I could probably understand it. The main difference is the intonation. And spelling. And some words.”
“Okay, but did you ask me how I was?” Jesse asks.
“Nope.”
“Busted. Mom never got around to teaching us the language,” he says. “I don’t think it’s gonna stick now.” He says “Mom” and laughs at himself with a voice that is not at all white-guy sounding. It’s not the words he says, but his voice — it has the texture of Deacon James’s when he preaches, the feel of Drew’s when he speaks.
“Jesse can show you where you’re sitting, and between the two of you decide how to split up the work. Jesse knows what needs to get done.”
“And Rachel,” Drew says. “Good news,” though I don’t understand why I should think it is once he tells me: “Lakeisha’s coming to visit next week for the summer. She’s looking forward to seeing you.”
JESSE’S GOING TO be a freshman at Reed College in the fall. He lives across the Fremont Bridge over in the Northwest hills. He went to Catlin Gabel, a private school. That means he’s probably rich. I wonder why someone like him would want to be somewhere like here. Especially if you didn’t have to be. The center is not exactly dirty, but it’s not new. And the men who are in the rehab program here can be kind of scary. Some have lived on the street for years. For most of them it shows: They have black teeth and deep lines in their faces; they have heavy cigarette coughs and rough skin.
The good thing about the center is that even though it feels poor there’s also a feeling of hope. The men joke with each other and laugh. They drink lots of coffee and work hard at the jobs they’ve been assigned. They all want to get better.
“It looked good on my college applications. It’s not the kind of thing I want to do for real, but it’s an easy job,” Jesse says when I ask. He’s nonchalant when he says it. He makes a crooked grin.
“Why are you here?” he asks me.
I don’t mention Anthony Miller or the plan Grandma and Drew have for me. “Same.”
Above Jesse’s desk are two pictures of his family — mom, dad, and sister.
“We went to Denmark last year,” Jesse says, pointing to the photo of his family standing next to a guard at the queen’s castle.
I have never thought of Denmark as a landscape. Denmark, the one I know, has never been so much a real place as a story setting for things that Mor did or told. I know Denmark through her stories. My Denmark would be pictures of bakeries full of fresh bread, school rooms with desks that open like a box, and Christmas trees decorated with real candles. In the pictures of my Denmark there wouldn’t be people — except for Mor, except for the times I put myself there too. If I had drawn a picture of Denmark, it would have been a picture of a feeling inside me, I think — like a cloudless sky, somewhere close to the color blue.
“My mom would trip out if you talked Danish to her,” he says. “That’d be cool.”
AT A QUARTER after twelve, I’m not close to halfway through the pile of papers I’m supposed to file by the end of the day. Jesse and I have been talking the whole time.
Jesse isn’t like a white guy. He calls white people pilgrims. He speaks a broken Mayan Spanish. He recites revolutionary Jamaican poems by heart. He’s surprised that I haven’t read Black Skin, White Masks all the way through.
Jesse lived in New York City until he was twelve. He spent long holidays and summers in Jamaica and the Virgin Islands. His family has homes in all of those places. Jesse is a vegetarian and knows things about black people that only black people know — like what it means for a black girl’s hair to “go back.” The things I learned after I came to live with Grandma and Aunt Loretta. I’m surprised that someone would have told him. Had he actually asked?
I HEAR THE music even before we reach the recreation room. It’s not a song I know, but a part of me wants to fill in words to each note. It’s a sad song, but also one with hope. In the recreation room, there’s a man playing piano and a few men watching TV. It feels like a waiting room more than a recreation room. The couches and chairs are s
hallow and are made of a rough-looking red canvas material. The floor has no rugs. The television, mounted high in the corner like in a doctor’s office, is barely twenty inches across and must be difficult to see with the light that cuts in from the bare window. It is only the piano music that makes it feel like a place you’d want to relax.
Jesse and I sit and eat silently, both listening to the music.
When the piano player finishes, one guy claps. Jesse and I clap too. The piano player gets up and hugs Jesse, and they pat each other on the shoulder the way that black men would with closed fists. How does Jesse know this too?
“Yo, man. Time to get back to work,” the piano player says.
“This is Drew’s niece.”
“She’s a pretty young lady.”
I smile.
“Are you a model? You’ve got beautiful eyes,” the piano player says.
“No.”
“My man, ain’t got any manners,” Jesse says. “The brother grew up in the Chicago projects.”
“Lived in the projects and the streets. I grew up when I got here,” the piano player says.
The piano player is tall. I have to tilt my head up sixty degrees to look at his face. He is nice-looking. Not handsome, but pretty. He has his mother’s eyes, I think. He has a way of seeing that his mother gave him is what I mean. It is my first thought. Then I notice the color (brown with gold flecks) and the (long) lashes. He has a deep soulful gaze and a way of seeing into you.
“How tall are you? Do you mind me asking?” I say.
“Just shy of six five.”
“Almost six and a half feet?”
“Yeah, and I never played ball.”
“You get this all the time,” I say.
“Like you hear, where are you from? When they want to know where you got those beautiful eyes.” I am charmed so easily. I hope it doesn’t show. “From my aunt. Aunt Loretta,” I say.
“Slow your roll, dawg,” Jesse says.
I smile.
“There’s nothing wrong with complimenting a young lady.”
“This is my buddy. He’s good people,” Jesse says. “A star in the program.”
“You’re in the program?” I ask.
“I was. Got 120 days clean now. Your uncle hired me on staff when I finished — at least until I find something more permanent. You here for the summer?” the piano player asks.
“I’m working here for the summer. For Drew. I mean. And I’m from here, but,” and I say for no particular reason, “I used to live in Chicago too.”
“Chi-town in the house, right?” The piano player puts out his fist for me to touch.
“Yeah.” I am embarrassed because I don’t know what to do. Do I knock his fist with my own? Hold out my hand, palm flat?
He must see the discomfort in my eyes.
“Let me do this proper.” He takes my hand gently in his own and kisses it. “Hi, my friends call me Brick.”
Brick
Brick was used to the small squat building. It was not used to his frame. He hunched beneath the showerhead to wash his hair. He could have guessed that he would be this tall. No one else — if anyone had been paying attention — would have made the same prediction since he had been so small for his age as a boy.
He rented this spare room five blocks away from the Salvation Army Harbor Lights Center. It was all the world he could handle after roaming the country for the last six years; he knew what kind of landscape he belonged in.
The first months after he left home — before the pimples showed up on his chin, and the hair appeared in his armpits and on his below parts, before his voice began to deepen — he spent with the white man and woman he came to know as Paul and Lisa.
They’d stand on the side of the road near freeway ramps. “Will play song for money. Help us and our kid.”
The cardboard box sign and the fact that they placed themselves at a traffic light worked. On most days they’d collect enough to eat, to pay for a place to sleep, and to get high. Not many folks asked for the song. But when they did, you could be sure they’d add a five- or a ten- or a twenty-dollar bill to the spare change they had first placed in Lisa’s hand with pity or contempt or disgust. “You really shouldn’t have your boy out here — out of school,” came the familiar rebuke. It was funny: No one ever questioned the veracity of their family. Brick didn’t know how people made sense of the two young rockers with a curly-haired, light brown boy in tow. But they did. And no one ever thought to ask Brick: Do you want to stay with your mom and dad? Or would you like to live in a real home?
Paul and Lisa didn’t treat him too badly. They didn’t beat him; they fed him when they ate; gave him a place to sleep each night they had one. And on the nights he woke screaming with the bird-boy’s face in his mind’s eye or the pigeon man chasing him in his dreams, they gave him that melty-feeling pill to make the bad dreams disappear.
There were a couple of times, though — of course it was only when they were high and drunk — they thought it was funny when his sex got hard. Once he ejaculated while the woman named Lisa toyed with him. He was so scared of having that thing sneeze again for a week he was afraid to touch it when he peed.
As the months passed, he grew. His monkey face must have looked suddenly more menacing. He was as tall as a high school senior by age twelve. He was a black boy and no use to Paul and Lisa, who needed not just a good musician but a child to make their panhandling a success.
They left him one afternoon. It’d been raining for three days in a row and they scored no more than a few bucks in change after twelve-hour shifts. Irritable, totally not high, Paul and Lisa left their monkey and the bill at the diner where they had a late lunch. One monkey wasn’t going to stop their show.
That was the first of a series of adoptions for Brick. That night it was the waitress — fifty-something, a mother whose son had been jailed for killing a man — who took him home. She wanted him to shut the blinds for her. Check around the house. She hadn’t known how much she needed a man around to feel safe until her son was sent away. Brick stayed there for two weeks until the day she called the family services to get him a real place to live. He wrote thank you on a pad by the phone, and left without the sandwich she’d made him for lunch. The one thing he was certain of — even at that young age — was that he’d find his own home.
Next there was the old man: a blind army vet who needed help with the yard and some things around the house. “Niggers changed everything around this neighborhood.” He couldn’t hear the black in Brick’s voice. He shared his theories about spooks with Brick for a week until Brick could take it no longer. Then there was the piano teacher, a widow, who heard Brick play his harmonica at the bus stop and invited him home to hear her play. She played him a beautiful waltz and gestured for him to sit on the bench so she could show him. It was the first time he had played a piano and though his hands were unsteady at first, he caught on quickly. He was a natural, the woman said. They had a cozy routine after that: breakfast, a morning walk, a little gardening, to the grocery store, home to the piano — a song and a lesson, an afternoon nap and supper by six. The widow drew him into her day as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had been living with a sky with no sun. He was there four months when her kids got wind of him staying there and called the cops. “Little con artist” they called him and claimed Brick was trying to muscle in on their inheritance.
The list went on and on: the single mom with a six-month-old son, the retired Jewish couple with the would-be show dog, the black man with three old Chevys on cement blocks in his driveway. These people would take him in for a spell. He’d help around the house or do work in the yard — he’d do whatever he could to earn the right to another meal and a night’s sleep indoors. He drifted for months, living on the kindness of strangers. Brick was boyish despite his size, and he charmed everyone he met. But by the time he turned fifteen, things began to change. Because of his size he looked much older than he was — lik
e a man who could be thirty. A drifter — no matter his magazine-friendly face — was likely to be a gang member, a drug dealer, something that brought trouble.
Homes were closed to him. And he became a man of his own then.
He did odd jobs here and there. Kitchen help. Moving man. Stockroom boy. Ranch hand.
At night he’d frequent the town bar, have a beer — always too much beer. But he wasn’t an alcoholic, which was what he’d told himself on the mornings he couldn’t remember how he had found himself to this or that motel or rented room.
He went through as many names as he did towns. Monkey. Slim. T.J. People were always giving him a letter for a name. In one town he was D2 for a stretch — every stranger at the bar got the name Dee — he just happened to be the second stranger to appear in one day.
Never did he think of going home. Was home still there? Was it ever?
He wondered often about his mother. Fixed in his mind, was an image of his best her. She was smiling, seated on the old green couch when it was new, still plastic-wrapped and clean, with him on her lap. He was five, maybe six. She was tickling him with the long braid she’d made of her hair, and he was tickling back. Who took that photograph? He didn’t know. But it always made him feel hopeful. There was a witness to those good days; another person who knew his mother’s best her.
Brick continued to play the harmonica, and in the bars he’d play the piano. He’d start with something rousing, a good bar song — and always, always he’d end the night with Roger’s song.
Women loved him. He was big now; he had a wide, solid back, lean through the middle, forearms strong with Indian hair, and his chest too. His teeth, an inheritance — the best legacy of years of ancestors bred in slavery, he’d say wryly — were straight and solid. God, when he smiled at the girls! And when he played his music — what they wouldn’t do — but that was not what made him play.
“I like that song,” the women would say. “The one at the end. What are the words?” There were no words. But when a girl would ask, he’d make up some lyrics. Hum. Mmmm. Hmmm. Hum. The words were sometimes just a jumble of unrelated phrases — all related to Roger’s story, the one he repeated to himself each night. Still promising himself one day he’d continue his journey. Always the reminder of the bird-boy’s face, his promise to Roger, his now missing childhood. And always the girls had questions: “How’d you end up here?” Meaning Saint Louis, Oak Falls, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Fargo, Tucson, Sheridan, Phoenix, Banner — small town or city. “What brought you here?” I had to run from the police, age eleven — because I was wrongly accused. “Of what?” Not being able to see what was right before my eyes. And then of lying about it.
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Page 13