How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  “Thanks,” she tells him when he makes her a cup of warm peppermint tea and holds an ice pack to her face when she is finished.

  “Thanks,” she says when he repeats his promise that she can stay in his grand house as long as she needs to. She needs to get away from that man, Grayson tells her, his kind do not get any better. And Lala repeats her thanks.

  Grayson shows her a beautiful blue-gray room in his basement, where a white, wooden single bed with a soft comforter printed with waves beckons. She sits on this bed, runs her hands over that comforter, touches the pristine white pillowcases on top of it. When she turns to say thanks again, Grayson is gone.

  Lala is sitting in that room, looking out through a jalousie window onto a sheltered patio and the crashing waves below it. She is marveling at the fact that the very sea that splashes the concrete foundations of his grand guard walls, that licks and lashes the delicate wrought-iron railings with the points like spears, this very sea is the one that, from the window in her husband’s house, once threatened to swallow her. This water that stays behind Grayson’s porch and patio and writhes against its own restraint, that applauds each encroachment on the stone tiles before dragging itself back and into the beyond, this is the very same water from which she runs daily.

  She goes to the window and lifts the sash and stares at the sea. And into that rectangular patch of vision steps Grayson with a bag of oranges. Like maybe he thought it best to keep watch outside her bedroom just in case someone had seen her come here, just in case something in her tempted her to go back.

  He does not eat his oranges the way normal people do. He does not peel the dimpled skin until it is all gone and break the exposed flesh into segments he can put neatly into his mouth and swallow. Instead he eats the entire orange at once when the skin has been roughly removed with his bare hands, so that patches of bitter white rind still cling to the sweet citrus below it. Grayson sucks and swallows his oranges whole, pausing only to spit an offending piece of white rind or a hard gray seed into his palm. He does not treat oranges like a luxury costing too many dollars per bag, like something to be savored, he eats them like they are made to be devoured, without thought to where the next orange is coming from.

  When he sees her he stares, like he is surprised she is there, peering through the window, like his worst fears have been confirmed and she is in fact planning an escape. And this, perhaps more than anything, is why Lala reaches out a thick black hand and takes an orange from him, an orange newly peeled and placed into his palm. This is why she sinks her teeth into pulp still smarting from his fingers, and swallows juice his fingers have already touched. He stands and watches her eat it and reaches up a bristled hand to brush away a swollen piece of citrus that sits beside her nose and when his hand lingers on her face, she notices that his fingers have already cooled with the exit of the sun, that his skin is already sand-dusted by the billowing air, and she holds them there because her own face feels hot in comparison.

  “Feels like a fever,” he tells her. He’s retired, but he knows a fever when he feels one. He puts down his bag of oranges and leaves to fetch a pan of cold water and a soft cloth and a bottle of something with a pharmacist’s label on it, a prescription written for someone else. Grayson bathes not just her breast but her entire body, wiping her softly so that he does not offend the throbbing tooth, the oozing wounds, the scarring lip. When he is done, he bandages her breast and strokes her brow and helps her into a smaller woman’s blousy nightgown and tucks her into bed.

  “Thanks . . .”

  Lala is soothed into a sleep so strong she is unable to hear him say, “You’re welcome.”

  * * *

  Lala used to tell her friends at school that her mother had named her for a song, one she insisted her father sang to her mother regularly when they were courting. The way Esme told it, Lala’s father was not just the random sailor Wilma insisted he was, theirs was the type of love that lives in poetry. Lala used to tell her school friends that her father owned many ships and someday he would send for her.

  By the time Lala was old enough to question this story, to test the weight of it, her mother was dead and Wilma would not help her. She had never met her father, said Wilma, he was probably one of the street rabs her mother had taken up with. Lala grew to understand that she must not ask Wilma about her father. This father therefore haunted her by his absence for the rest of her life.

  In Lala’s imagination, it was her father who had named her. She surmised this because the only other thing that incensed Wilma more than her granddaughter asking her who her father was, was her asking her how she had come to get her name. Lala told her how she remembered her mother singing this name to her when she was little, holding her close and singing the two notes, over and over, so that Lala understood that the way to sing her name was important, it was something she should not forget.

  Wilma withered under the weight of this name. Lala did not know then, but her name was Wilma’s reminder of the insolent humming of her daughter Esme when she told her that she was expecting that day by Auntie Earlie and Wilma had tried her best to persuade her to drink as much okra and parsley and red radish as she could stand in an effort to get rid of the baby. Esme had refused. She had not just refused, she had hummed as she did so, those same two notes under her breath all day while Wilma tried to talk her out of motherhood.

  This is why Wilma refuses to call Lala by this name, why the child and then the woman eventually forgot how it was meant to be sung. Instead, Wilma calls her granddaughter “Stella,” her middle name, or she does not address her by name at all.

  How could Wilma not expect this child to look for her mother’s humming, to be drawn like a moth to a flame to anyone who wished not only to retrieve this name, but to dust it off, shake it out, try it on with her? From the moment they met, Adan had called her no other name but Lala, had sung her name in every tone he could think of to see if she would recognize it, would remember exactly the notes her mother intended her to.

  It was one of the reasons she had loved him.

  Chapter 32

  Tone

  5 September 1984

  The first hint of federation is the boat – Adan doesn’t think it is big enough. The vessel that has brought the cargo sits waiting five miles off the shoreline for the little fishing boat Adan has hired to go out to meet it. The plan is that this little fishing boat will then bring three hundred pounds of marijuana Adan has not yet paid for onto the beach near the mouth of a cave that leads into the tunnels, and Tone and Adan will lift and drag the huge bales of tightly pressed weed into the tunnels. There they will separate them into their constituent parts – heavy square bricks the size of concrete blocks – and stow them in one of the dusty dead-end chambers that is difficult to get to. They will wrap these bricks tightly in several layers of plastic wrap and put them high up on a ledge that Tone has already pointed out to Adan, and then Tone will deliver the blocks to Adan’s customers in ones and twos and threes and bring the money back to Adan for onsend to the source of the supply.

  But things do not go according to plan.

  When the fisherman turns up, the boat he is using is too small, Adan thinks, to carry all the cargo, and two trips are likely to arouse suspicion. So says Adan. He has had to pay the coast-guard captain to look the other way, but the captain can do so for only so long. One trip is all they have.

  The fisherman is an elderly man whose callused bare feet traverse the sand without hurt or hurry as he readies the little vessel to launch. He is a big man himself, with weather-beaten skin the color of charcoal, and he doesn’t seem to be unduly affected by Adan’s bluster about how he has tricked him by bringing a boat too small to carry the cargo, how he is jukking out his eye by demanding more money if it will be two trips instead of one. The fisherman does not seem to see the need for much conversation at all. As Adan quarrels, the fisherman merely readies his boat.

  Tone stands waiting at the mouth of the cave, smoking a cigarette an
d thinking. Although it is a calm, clear night – one of the ones where stars twinkle like diamonds in a velvety sky and the milky quarter moon looks like one painted in a storybook – there is an undercurrent of chaos. Ma Tone would tell him that the lead in the bottom of his belly means that he should abandon the plans and walk away, he thinks, but Ma Tone is not here and Tone therefore tries to deny that he should. Ma Tone would not approve, he knows, of him applying her wisdom to a matter such as this.

  The second sign of federation happens a few hours later, when the fisherman comes back with a boat laden with tightly wrapped plastic bales and Tone is shoulder to shoulder with Adan, heaving these bales off the fishing boat and struggling under the weight of bales much heavier than he had imagined they would be.

  “How come these so heavy?” Tone begins as they watch the fisherman leave for the second trip, his pocket bulging with money Adan has gathered from the series of “investors” whose identity he hasn’t thought to share. Tone is brushing the grit from his calves, removing a new pair of Bally sneakers one of his clients bought him, shaking them free of sand, rubbing a smudge of wet leaf from a lace and replacing them. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with a washcloth, runs his elegant fingers over those fine facial bones, and waits for them both to recover their breath sufficiently to drag the first set of bales back to the cave.

  Adan is sitting on a nearby rock and smiling, his lips stretched so high and wide that his one gold cap catches the moon and flashes Tone a reminder of the time they ventured together to Chinky’s little shop to have it fashioned from the melted necklace of one or another of Adan’s unfortunate victims. When the grill had been fitted, Adan had smiled at Tone just like he is smiling now, and Chinky had clapped Tone on the back as if to beckon his agreement when he said as man, gold grill suit Adan good-good in truth. Those were the days before Adan had met and married Lala, Tone remembers, before Tone had started spending nights with tourist women.

  “It cold, eh?” observes Adan, and Tone realizes that he is shivering. He pulls a slim black hoodie closer about his face and neck, holds onto his shark tooth and keeps his hand there.

  “It bitching,” he agrees, and Adan flashes his gold cap again.

  “You want a pull?”

  Tone shakes his head No.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Adan reaches into the pocket of his tight black joggers and pulls out a small spliff and a lighter, which is soon crowned by an erratic orange flame. He cups his big hands around the lighter and brings it up to his lips, where the roach sits waiting.

  Tone does not warn him that a spliff can draw attention to them if police are patrolling the beach looking for errant lovers or lawless men. He does not remind Adan that they could be discovered by adventurous tourists who might be drawn by the sickly-sweet smell of the weed and think that Adan and Tone are out there selling it. Tone looks around instead, to see if there is anyone about who could cause them worry. There isn’t, but his chest is still heavy somehow, he still shivers from time to time when he is more than accustomed to the chilly nighttime breeze.

  When the fisherman returns with the second half of the shipment, Adan flicks open a switchblade, slits one of the bales, withdraws the tip of the knife and tastes it, and Tone knows then that Adan has duped him. The cargo isn’t marijuana. The fisherman takes his money and goes. Four huge bales sit ominously on the sand like the shaped and sanded brothers of the boulders that climb the perimeter of the beach.

  “As man, you ain’t tell me nuttin ’bout this,” Tone begins. “You say you was bringing in green, big man.”

  Adan shrugs, flicks the knife shut, and brushes his arms off distractedly, as if Tone is a bug alighting on his skin on a humid afternoon. Something he can swipe away if he cares to, but only if he cares to.

  “You know how much money this is in these bags?” Adan starts to drag one toward the tunnel. “Hurry up – ain’t got time for the coast guard tonight.”

  Tone hesitates, because he knows that he has plans to give the money from this job to Lala. But he didn’t agree to no coke, so he takes a last, deliberate drag from his cigarette and drops it on the sand, crushing the orange embers with the heel of his brand-new sneakers.

  “As man,” he starts slowly, “I don’t deal with no coke, Adan. I don’t smoke it, I don’t touch it. I don’t sell it. I ain’t no coke man.”

  For a minute the crickets sing loudly and the waves splat against the shore and the two men stare at each other.

  “I know,” Adan says slowly. “I know you ain’t no coke man, Tone.”

  Tone doesn’t move.

  “So why you ain’t tell me about the coke, then?”

  “We ain’t got time for this now,” Adan says dismissively. “We could settle this later, I could pay you some more for the trouble.”

  Tone rocks back and forth on his heels, shakes his head, squeezes his eyes tightly shut.

  “It ain’t about the money, Adan, as man,” Tone protests.

  And in truth, it isn’t. It is about the fact that since they were boys in the half-ruin of Ma Tone’s house, Adan has been the bigger one and therefore the boss, merely by preordination of his size. It is about the fact that fate has concluded that Adan’s primacy in everything should also result in his right to love Lala, who still inhabits Tone’s dreams at night. It is about the fact that Adan knows that his superordinate status is the natural order of things, so that it does not even occur to him there’s something wrong with asking for Tone’s help in hiding a few hundred pounds of ganja when he knows full well that ganja isn’t what they will be hiding. And all the things that it is about converge in one statement of principle that he cannot deviate from.

  “I ain’t helping hide no coke,” says Tone. “I tell you I ain’t no coke man.”

  Adan puffs up with sudden rage, flails his arms, sucks his teeth.

  “Don’t talk no rasshole foolishness, Tone!” he begins. “You say you was gonna help me and now you backing down? What happen to you, bwoy?”

  For Tone, his relegation to a mere bwoy is proof of the very insult that has made him refuse to help hide the cocaine in the first place. The small openings in his mind – the doors propped ajar by the happy times of a shared childhood, by the common threads of the adult struggle to survive – slam firmly and finally shut. He starts to walk away, thinking about Lala, about how, perhaps, he will try to leave with her, start over somewhere where he does not have to prowl the beaches looking for women who look for dick, where he does not have to close his mind to the woman beneath him and focus on the one in his head in order to give wealthy tourist women the good time they hire him for, where he does not hustle tourists for Jet Skis in the quasi-American accent his kind uses to ensure that they are understood, where he does not have to hustle weed for Adan, or sell stolen goods, where he is not relegated to the life of a soldier for a thief. Tone is thinking he will buy two tickets and not one, he will stand in the long line at the embassy and suffer the sun and the sweat and the risk of the shame of a refusal to get a US visa and then, when he does, he and Lala will leave for the United States of America and they will stay there.

  “Bwoy? Bwoy?! I is way more man than you, Adan,” Tone affirms, “from long time now.”

  Something in his voice when he says it unlocks a drawer in Adan’s mind. It is the mental drawer in which, unbeknownst to himself, he has filed away the stricken expressions on Tone’s face anytime Adan has returned home to find him there a moment or more too early, it is the drawer in which he has filed his mental notes about how Tone took to knocking on the PEPSI door once Lala became pregnant, how he never seemed to want to stick around once Adan arrived at home, although he seemed to have been so comfortable a moment or two before in Lala’s presence alone. The drawer unlocks and Adan fumbles around inside it, disbelieving what has only now been made clear to him.

  “What the rasshole you mean by that, Tone, eh? What you really mean by that?”

  But there is really no need to ask
the question.

  “Pussy like you, Adan,” Tone continues, because it is time, because he has been holding his tongue for almost two years. “Play you bad, you feel I going let you bad me up like Lala, Pussy? Cause only a pussy does beat he wife so. You want to see who is bwoy?”

  And there, before their very eyes, Tone grows tall, turns terrible.

  “As man,” threatens Tone, “call me bwoy again, Adan, and see what I do wid you.”

  There is silence. The sea stops its roar, the crickets do not whistle, the branches of the coconut palms cease their sway and tremble. Adan is stunned. He is staring at his friend, grown into a giant before him, he is listening to a confession released in a roar. He understands that Tone is not sorry, Tone is scornful. And his scorn is the worst insult of all.

  So Adan laughs. A long laugh that resonates with the nervous trees and reassures them until they stop trembling. A wide, down-from-the-belly laugh that would make someone think the worst was now over, if anyone else was there. This laugh would make such a person anticipate the back-clapping, knee-slapping good humor of reconciliation, of the realization that we is we at the end of the day, that bad man don’t fight over gal, that this is just a little thing, a thing to be surmounted.

  “So that is what happening, eh?” says Adan. “That is what happening.”

  He shrugs in the manner of a man resigned and Tone feels himself exhale. The friendship is over, Tone realizes, most important now is getting Lala away. Adan will not suffer this knowledge silently.

  Tone is walking away when he hears the thud of the heavy bag Adan was holding hit the sand, feels the rush of wind that tells him Adan is in pursuit, that this will not end peaceably. And just like that he perceives the Thing He Cannot Name, realizes that it has been with him even tonight, hiding in the murk of his shadow. Tone grabs a rock he did not know was sitting on the beach, he turns, he swings, catches Adan below the chin and snaps his head backward and is spattered by the blood of his best friend.