Ms. McLeod had printed out a small picture from the same surveillance tape showing Tawana in her prize-winning outfit, all gleaming white with fuzzy pink flowers. But in the background of that picture there was another figure in white, a man. And no one who looked at the picture had any idea who he might have been. He wasn’t one of the teachers, he wasn’t in maintenance, and parents rarely visited the school in the daytime. At night there were remedial classes for adult refugees in the basement classrooms, and slams and concerts, sometimes, in the auditorium.
Tawana studied his face a lot, as though it were a puzzle to be solved. Who might he be, that white man, and why was he there at her ceremony? She taped the picture on the inside of the door of her hall locker, underneath the magnetic To Do list with its three immaculately empty categories: Shopping, School, Sports. Then one day it wasn’t there. The picture had been removed from her locker. Nothing else had been taken, just that picture of Tawana in her robe and the white man behind her.
That was the last year there were summer vacations, After that you had to go to school all the time. Everybody bitched about it, but Tawana wondered if the complainers weren’t secretly glad if only because of the breakfast and lunch programs. With the new year-round schedule there was also a new music and dance teacher, Mr. Furbush, with a beard that had bleached tips. He taught junior high how to do ancient Egyptian dances, a couple of them really exhausting, but he was cute. Some kids said he was having a love affair with Ms. McLeod, but others said no, he was gay.
On a Thursday afternoon late in August of that same summer, when Tawana had already been home from school for an hour or so, the doorbell rang. Then it rang a second time, and third time. Anyone who wanted to visit the family would usually just walk in the house, so the doorbell served mainly as a warning system. But Tawana was at home by herself and she thought what if it was a package and there had to be someone to sign for it?
So she went to the door, but it wasn’t a package, it was a man in a white shirt and a blue tie lugging a satchel full of papers. “Are you Miss Makwinja?” he asked Tawana. She should have known better than to admit that’s who she was, but she said, yes, that was her name. Then he showed her a badge that said he was an agent for the Census Bureau and he just barged into the house and took a seat in the middle of the twins’ futon and started asking her questions. He wanted to know the name of everyone in the family, and how it was spelled and how old they all were and where they were born and their religion and did they have a job. An endless stream of questions, and it was no use saying you didn’t know, cause then he would tell her to make a guess. He had a thermos bottle hanging off the side of his knapsack, all beaded with sweat the same as his forehead. The drops would run down the sides of the bottle and down his forehead and his cheeks in zig-zags like the mice trying to escape from the laboratory in her brother’s video game. “I have to do my homework now,” she told him. “That’s fine,” he said and just sat there. Then after they both sat there a while, not budging, he said, “Oh, I have some other questions here about the house itself. Is there a bathroom?” Tawana nodded. “More than one bathroom?” “I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly she needed to go to the bathroom herself. But the man wouldn’t leave, and wouldn’t stop asking his questions. It was like going to the emergency room and having to undress.
And then she realized that she had seen him before this. He was the man behind her in the picture. The picture someone had taken from her locker. The man she had dreamed of again and again.
She got up off the futon and went to stand on the other side of the wooden trunk with the twins’ clothes in it. “What did you say your name was?” she asked warily.
“I don’t think I did. We’re not required to give out our names, you know. My shield number is K-384.” He tapped the little plastic badge pinned to his white shirt.
“You know our names.”
“True. I do. But that’s what I’m paid for.” And then he smiled this terrible smile, the smile she’d seen in stores and offices and hospitals all her life, without every realizing what it meant. It was the smile of an enemy, of someone sworn to kill her. Not right this moment, but someday maybe years later, someday for sure. He didn’t know it yet himself, but Tawana did, because she sometimes had psychic powers. She could look into the future and know what other people were thinking. Not their ideas necessarily, but their feelings. Her mother had had the same gift before she died.
“Well,” the white man said, standing up, with a different smile, “thank you for your time.” He neatened his papers into a single sheaf and stuffed them back in his satchel.
Someday, somewhere, she would see him again. It was written in the Book of Fate.
All that was just before Lionel got in trouble with the INS and disappeared. Lionel had been the family’s main source of unvouchered income, and his absence was a source of deep regret, not just for Lucy and the twins, but all of them. No more pizzas, no more hmong take-out. It was back to beans and rice, canned peas and stewed tomatoes. The cable company took away all the good channels and there was nothing to look at but Tier One, with the law and shopping channels and really dumb cartoons. Tawana got very depressed and even developed suicidal tendencies, which she reported to the school medical officer, who prescribed some purple pills as big as your thumb. But they didn’t help much more than a jaw of kwash.
Then Lucy fell in love with a Mexican Kawasaki dealer called Super Hombre and moved to Shakopee, leaving the twins temporarily with the family at the 26th Ave. N.E. house. Except it turned out not to be that temporary. Super Hombre’s Kawasaki dealership was all pretend. The bikes in the show window weren’t for sale, they were just parked there to make it look like a real business. Super Hombre was charged with sale and possession of a controlled substance, and Lucy was caught in the larger sting and got five to seven. Minnesota had become very strict about even minor felonies.
Without Lucy to look after them, the niños became Tawana’s responsibility, which was a drag not just in the practical sense that it meant curtailing her various extracurricular activities—the Drama Club, Muslim Sisterhood, Mall Minders—but because it was so embarrassing. She was at an age when she might have had niños of her own but instead she’d preserved her chastity. And all for nothing because here she was just the same, wheeling the niños back and forth from day care, changing diapers, screaming at them to shut the fuck up. But she never smacked them, which was more than you could say for Lionel or Lucy. Super Hombre had been a pretty good care provider, too, when he had to, except the once when he laid into Kenny with his belt. But Kenny had been asking for it, and Super Hombre was stoned.
The worst thing about being a substitute mom were the trips to the County Health Center. Why couldn’t people be counted on to look after their kids without a lot of government bureaucrats sticking their noses into it? All the paperwork, not to mention the shots every time there was some new national amber alert. Or the blood draws! What were they all about? If they did find out you were a carrier, what were they going to do about it anyhow? Empty out all the bad blood and pump you full of a new supply, like bringing a car in for a change of oil?
Basically Tawana just did not like needles and syringes. The sight of her own blood snaking into the little clouded plastic tube and slowly filling one cylinder after another made her sick. She would have nightmares. Sometimes just the sight of a smear of strawberry jam on one of the twin’s bibs would register as a bloodstain, and she would feel a chill through her whole body, like diving into a pool. She hated needles. She hated the Health Center. She hated every store and streetlight along the way to the Health Center. And most of all she hated the personnel. Nurse Lundgren with his phony smile. Nurse Richardson with her orange hair piled up in an enormous bun. Doctor Shen.
But if someone didn’t take the twins in to the Health Center, then there would be Inspectors coming round to the house, perhaps even the INS. And more papers to fill out. And the possibility that the niños would b
e taken off to foster care and the child care stipends suspended or even cancelled. So someone had to get them in to the Health Center and that someone was the person in the family with the least clout. Tawana.
Thanksgiving was the big holiday of the year for the Makwinjas, because of the turkeys. Back in the ’90s when the first Somalis had come to Minnesota, their grandfather among them, they’d all been employed by E.G. Harris, the biggest turkey processor in the country. Tawana had seen photographs of the gigantic batteries where the turkeys were grown. They looked like palaces for some Arabian sheik, if you didn’t know what they really were. One of the bonuses for E.G. Harris employees to this day was a supersized frozen bird on Thanksgiving and another at Christmas, along with an instruction DVD on making the most of turkey leftovers. There were still two members of the family working for E.G. Harris, so well into February there was plenty of turkey left for turkey pot pie, turkey noodle casserole, and turkey up the ass (which was what Lucy used to call turkey a la king).
The older members of the family, who could still remember what life had been like in Somalia, had a different attitude toward all the food in America than Tawana and her sisters and cousins. Their lives revolved around cooking and grocery shopping and food vouchers. So when the neighborhood Stop ‘N’ Shop was shut down and CVS took over the building, the older Makwinja women were out on the picket line every day to protest and chant and chain themselves to the awnings. (They were the only exterior elements that anything could be chained to: the doors didn’t have knobs or handles.) Of course, the protests didn’t accomplish anything. In due course CVS moved in, and once people realized there was nowhere else for fourteen blocks to buy basics like Coke and canned soup and toilet paper they started shopping there. One of the last things that Tawana ever heard her grandfather say was after his first visit to the new CVS to fill his prescription for his diabetes medicine. “You know what,” he said, “this city is getting to be more like Mogadishu every day.” Aunt Bima protested vehemently, saying there was no resemblance at all, that Minneapolis was all clean and modern, while Mogadishu had always been a dump. “You think I’m blind?” Grandpa asked. “You think I’m stupid?” Then he just clamped his jaw shut and refused to argue. A week later he was dead. An embolism.
Half a block from the CVS, what used to be a store selling mattresses and pine furniture had subdivided into an All-Faiths Pentecostal Tabernacle (upstairs) and (downstairs) the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Cooperative. There was a sign over the entrance (which was always padlocked) that said “IRON y MONGERS” and under that what looked almost like an advertisement from People or GQ showing four fashion models with big dopey grins under a slogan in mustard-yellow letters: “WELL-DRESSED PEOPLE WEAR CLEAN CLOTHES.” In the display windows on either side of the locked door were mannikins dressed entirely in white. The two male mannikins sported white tuxedos and there were a number of female mannikins in stiff sheer white dresses and veils like bridal gowns but sexy. There were bouquets of paper flowers in white vases, and a bookcase full of books all painted white—like the hands and faces of the mannikins. The paint had been applied as carefully as makeup. The mannikins’ eyes were realistically blue or green and their lips were bright red, even the two men.
The first time she saw them Tawana thought the mannikins were funny, that the paint on their faces was like the makeup on clowns. But then, walking by the windows a few days later, during a late afternoon snow flurry, she was creeped out. The mannikins seemed half-alive, and threatening. Then, on a later visit, Tawana started feeling angry, as though the display in the windows was somehow a slur directed at herself and her family and all the African Americans in the neighborhood, at everyone who had to walk past the store (which wasn’t really a store, since it was always closed) and look at the mannikins with their bright red lips and idiot grins. Why would anyone ever go to the trouble to fix up a window like that? They weren’t selling the clothes. You couldn’t go inside. If there was a joke, Tawana didn’t get it.
She began to dream about the two mannikins in the tuxedos. In her dream they were alive but mannikins at the same time. She was pushing the twins in their stroller along 27th Avenue, and the two men, with their white faces and red lips, were following her, talking to each other in whispers and snickering. When Tawana walked faster, so would they, and when she paused at every curb to lift or lower the wheels of the stroller, the two men would pause too. She realized they were following her in order to learn where she lived, that’s why they always kept their distance.
The man in charge of the All-Faiths Pentecostal Tabernacle was a Christian minister by the name of Gospel Blantyre Blount, D.D., and he came from Malawi. “Malawi,” the Reverend Blount explained to the seventh grade class visiting the Tabernacle on the second Tuesday of Brotherhood Month, “is a narrow strip of land in the middle of Africa, in the middle of four Z’s. To the west is Zambia and Zimbabwe, and to the east is Tanzania and Mozambique. I come from the town of Chiradzulu, which you may have read about or even seen on the news. The people there are mostly Zulus, and famous for being tall. Like me. How tall do you think I am?”
No one raised a hand.
“Don’t be shy, children,” said Ms. McLeod, who was wearing a traditional Zulu headress and several enormous copper earrings. “Take a guess. Jeffrey.”
Jeffrey squirmed. “Six foot,” he hazarded.
“Six foot, ten inches,” said Reverend Blount, getting up off his stool and demonstrating his full height, and an imposing gut as well. “And I’m the short guy in the family.”
This was greeted by respectful, muted laughter.
“Anyone here ever been to Africa?” Reverend Blount asked, in a rumbling, friendly voice, like the voice in the Verizon ads.
“I have!” said Tawana.
“Oh, Tawana, you have not!” Ms. McLeod protested with a rattle of earrings.
“I was born here in Minneapolis, but my family is from Somalia.”
Reverend Blount nodded his head gravely. “I’ve been there. Somalia’s a beautiful nation. But they got problems there. Just like Malawi, they got problems.”
“Gospel,” Ms. McLeod said, “you promised. We can’t get into that with the children.”
“Okay. But let me ask: how many of you kids has been baptised?”
Six of the children raised their hands. Jeffrey, who hadn’t, explained: “We’re Muslim, the rest of us.”
“The reason I asked, is in the Tabernacle here we don’t think someone is a ‘kid’ if they been baptized. So the baptized are free to listen or not, as they choose.”
“Gospel, this is not a religious matter.”
“But what if it is? What it is, for sure, is a matter of life and death. And it’s in the newspapers. I can show you! Right here.” He took a piece of paper from an inside pocket of his dashiki, unfolded it, and held it up for the visitors to see. “This is from the New York Times, Tuesday, January 14, 2003. Not that long ago, huh? And what it tells about is the vampires in Malawi. Let me just read you what it says at the end of the article, okay?
In these impoverished rural communities [they’re talking about Malawi], which lack electricity, running water, adequate food, education and medical care, peasant farmers are accustomed to being battered by forces they cannot control or fully understand. The sun burns crops, leaving fields withered and families hungry. Rains drown chickens and wash away huts, leaving people homeless. Newborn babies die despite the wails of their mothers and the powerful prayers of their elders.
People here believe in an invisible God, but also in malevolent forces—witches who change into hyenas, people who can destroy their enemies by harnessing floods. So the notion of vampires does not seem farfetched.
Rev. Blount laid the paper down on the pulpit and slammed his hand down over it, as though he were nailing it down. “And I’ll just add this. It especially don’t seem farfetched if you seen them with your own eyes! If you had neighbors who was vampires. If you seen the syringes they left behin
d them when they was all full of blood and sleepy. Cause that’s what these vampires use nowadays. They don’t have sharp teeth like cats or wolves, they got syringes! And they know how to use them as well as any nurse at the hospital. Real fast and neat, they don’t leave a drop of blood showing, just slide it in and slip it out.” He pantomimed the vampires’ expertise.
The Urban Fantasy Anthology Page 32