Ramadan Ramsey

by Louis Edwards

  “Boy, that’s not a parade. Git your butt—” But he was gone, bolting as fast as he had down the hall earlier.

  The man had started to give her her change, but she pulled her hand away. The quarter, a dime, and three pennies hit the counter and fell onto the floor as she rushed out.

  “Ramadan!” she had yelled, trying to catch him before he got to the street.

  When Adad heard her say, “Ramadan!” he was gathering the scattering coins, and he paused while pinching the metallic embossment of George Washington’s neck and his ribboned ponytail, thinking, What an odd name for a New Orleans boy. Then, as he continued picking up the rest of the change, he began adding things together as naturally and absentmindedly as he counted money. It was only as he was picking up the last penny that the sum of the truth came clear—the thirty-eight cents in his hand was a pot of gold. Looking down at the coins, he read the words IN GOD WE TRUST, and he whispered to himself, “Allahu Akbar.” Then he clasped his fist tight, kissed his fingers, and rushed out to bring the woman her change—and to have a better look at the child (yes, he was sure of it) who was a part of his family’s fortune.

  By the time he reached Mama Joon, she had Ramadan in her grasp.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” she was saying. “You can’t just run outside every time you hear a horn blow. You wanna mess around and get killed?”

  Adad was breathing heavily, only in part from the sprint. He let her finish schooling the boy, and then he went to her and put the change in her left hand. For a second, he just stood there smiling. With only one quick glance at Ramadan, Adad saw a miniature version of his own nose, Mustafa’s jawline, and that unmistakable, ancient Totah-esque pearliness roiling, less turbulently but there, in the boy’s eyes, with an American gleam or his youth, which may have been the same thing. Then he looked back at the woman—old enough to be the boy’s grandmother, he thought—and extended his hand to shake hers, proposing a union of sorts.

  She had had to undrape her arm from around Ramadan’s shoulder to accommodate the greeting from the man, who had even laid his second hand over hers in a warm, if inappropriate, show of emotion. She had chalked it up to some kind of foreigner’s hurricane fever, an inability to maintain his composure in the midst of the mania happening all around him as the city panicked. And then he’d said it:

  Take good care of our boy!

  Our boy? It hadn’t sounded so odd at the time. People tended to get all communal in a crisis, didn’t they? She had witnessed that during other storms, and she was counting on it again. That was one of the reasons she was heading to the Superdome in the first place, tempted to experience once more the fellowship she had known decades before during Hurricane Betsy—the impassioned consensus to survive. When everyone was feeling all we and us, the mutually possessive our was understandable. Our boy. Okay. Whatever. Surely it was the same even in—wherever this shopkeeper was from. The fumes from the gas pumps were starting to make her swoon. Maybe they were playing with his head, too. At any rate, he looked uncomfortable. Something awkward in his posture spoke of an indoorish nature. He was stooped over, almost bowing to her and Ramadan, as if he felt the sky was lower than the ceiling in his store and therefore more threatening.

  “Of course,” she had said, starting to walk away from the pumps, wanting to breathe the less fumy, pre-hurricane air, which, though it did not smell toxic, had a pungency all its own. “He’s my baby.”

  Adad wanted to add, “Yes . . . mine, too.” But instead, he merely said, “Please come back again.”

  Mama Joon had told him goodbye, and she and Ramadan went home, fixed the sandwiches, and joined the spotty procession to the Dome.

  But now, in the shower hiding from Ramadan’s adamant pleas, she couldn’t help but reconsider the meaning of the man’s two-fisted handshake and his our.

  The next morning, while Ramadan was taking a bath, she called Clarissa in Baton Rouge.

  “That was Adad,” Clarissa told her. “He owns the place. And of course he came running after y’all. He figured out Ramadan is his people.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Haven’t you ever taken a good look at Ramadan, Mama Joon? He ain’t nothing but a little Quicky Mart kid. Probably not the only one, neither. His daddy was the tall one. Adad’s son or his nephew. The one named Mustafa.”

  “Yes!” Mama Joon said. “Mustafa!” That was it. She knew she would know the name when she heard it again. Mustafa—not Mos Def! “But how do you know him?”

  “I didn’t know him. But I know Alicia was in love with him, or whatever. I used to hear them going at it through the walls while you were at work. He stopped coming around not too long after she got pregnant. You know how that goes . . .”

  And so she did.

  After she hung up with Clarissa, all she could think about was this mysterious Mustafa, less mysterious now that she knew his name. When she finished dressing Ramadan and pulling herself together, it was early afternoon, so they headed out for lunch. There was a Popeyes fried chicken restaurant near the motel, and she decided it would have to suffice. Without a kitchen of her own and no transportation in this sprawling if hospitable Texas town, she didn’t have many choices. Besides, Popeyes, as much as any fast food could, tasted like home. Before they even rounded the corner, Ramadan looked up, saw the orange, red, and white sign out front, and shouted, “Popeyes!”

  Inside, as she watched him bite into a drumstick, her thoughts of Mustafa faded. No, she wasn’t thinking about Ramadan’s daddy at all. Seeing him sitting across the table breathing and eating—alive—sent a tremor of Alicia’s being through her body. Overcome, she moaned. Ramadan paused mid-bite and looked at his grandmother.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “You just like your mama, boy.”

  “I am?”

  “Mmm hmm.” Mama Joon shook her head and smiled. “She sure did like greasy-crunchy. Just like you.”

  It felt good to be thinking and reminiscing about Alicia. Maybe talking about her—which they rarely did—the lost soul who connected her and Ramadan, would help pull him out of his funk.

  But then Ramadan, lips glistening, took another bite of his drumstick, narrowed his eyes, and said, “I bet my daddy like greasy-crunchy, too.”

  7

  Ramadan at the Window

  After two months in Houston, Mama Joon had had enough of fast food and the slow torture that is exile. Clarissa had driven to New Orleans a few weeks earlier to check on the neighborhood and reported that the house had not flooded, or been damaged or vandalized; she even had the utilities turned back on.

  “Everything’s good. But we like Baton Rouge,” she had said, calling Mama Joon from her brand-new cell phone. “At least for now.”

  Sure they did. As long as the FEMA gravy train was rolling—money, food stamps, free apartments. It all felt like some kind of backhanded, day-late-dollar-short attempt at reparations to Mama Joon. Well, so be it. Better America’s tit than hers!

  As for her and Ramadan, it was time to go home. She was too old to let go of the past, her life in New Orleans, and he was too young to imagine a future anywhere else. Especially since, as he reminded her every day, if not with words, then with his increasingly mannish behavior, home was where the search for his father, now that he knew he existed, would begin. She wanted him to meet his father, too, as well as his other relatives, who apparently had been right around the corner from their house all along. With Alicia gone, with Clarissa being Clarissa, with her sons being who they were, and, most critically, with the blood that was reappearing however occasionally in her stool, Mama Joon thought Ramadan might need his paternal family. Besides, locating his father, who Clarissa called . . . Mu-stafa—oh crap, was that even it?—might be as easy as walking over to the Quicky Mart, shaking hands again with that Adad, and formally introducing him to the little boy they both knew was his kin.

  So then, on their first day back in New Orleans, Mama Joon, sti
ll standing in her musty, unlived-in living room, surrounded by their luggage, didn’t resist Ramadan’s tug of her arm; she knew where he wanted to go. He had gotten everything but Mustafa’s name out of her—mainly because she still wasn’t sure she had it right. But also, she didn’t want to make him too real to Ramadan. What if Clarissa’s information about all of this business was as untrustworthy as she was?

  On this sunny late October afternoon, Mama Joon found herself trudging to the Quicky Mart, trying to keep up with the boy as they passed mostly populated if quiet-looking homes. She saw open storm shutters, shadows moving past windows, garbage cans overflowing at the curb. The cabbie who had driven them from the airport had said, “In the daytime things ain’t so strange . . . in some places, like where you live at. But at night—it’s a whole lot darker everywhere.” Well, so far he was right. She was tired and looking forward to sleeping her way through their first night home in the comfort of her own bed. For that, the darker, the better.

  But unlike the rest of the neighborhood, Adad’s store was still shuttered. Large planks of plywood covered the big windows facing Rampart Street, as though no one had returned since the storm’s passing. Mama Joon held Ramadan’s hand, and they walked slowly past the now odorless gas pumps. The window on the Governor Nicholls Street side of the building was not boarded up. A hodgepodge of posters—BEER, SOFT DRINKS, SANDWICHES, BEST PRICES—blocked a clear view into the store, but someone a foot taller than Mama Joon would have been able to peek in at Adad, seated behind his cash register—were he there.

  A man walking by on the opposite side of the street saw Mama Joon craning her neck to see inside and yelled, “Don’t look like they coming back!”

  His voice startled her. She felt as if she were trespassing—or had just been caught being nosy, which was somehow worse.

  “Somebody said them boys got deported. Some kinda Nine-Eleven, hurricane mix-up. Nice people, too. I hear they still ain’t found the old man.”

  Pretending to be satisfied with this information, Mama Joon began to walk away. But Ramadan stood his ground, grabbing her wrist and jerking her to a stop.

  “What?” she said.

  “I want to see.” He was pointing up at the window.

  She looked warily to the left and right. The gossipy passerby was gone and she didn’t see anyone else. With the store closed, whatever vitality this corner once had, at least for now, was lost.

  She faced the window and the wall of posters and said, “It’s too high.”

  Ramadan took two steps toward the building and began jumping up and down. “Pick me up! Pick me up!”

  “All right, all right—don’t be making no scene! Not out here. Time for you to grow up, anyway.”

  She tossed her purse to the ground. Then she bent down and came up behind Ramadan quickly, putting her hands around his waist and lifting him over her head. He stretched his legs out straight, parallel to the ground, pressed his hands down on her shoulders, and, with the balance of a gymnast mounting a pommel horse, he lowered his body. In a flash, he had wishboned himself into place. His thighs rested on her shoulders, his crotch nestled against the nape of her neck, and he secured the position by clasping his calves under her armpits. Each had surprised the other—and themselves—with their dexterity, impressed that their well-practiced kitchen choreography transferred admirably to other locales.

  She had seen people hoisting children in this way, but she had never done it herself. The sharp pain in her neck told her it was a masculine move. But maybe this was what would be required, if Ramadan was to quell his fever dreams. (Just last night she had massaged him out of another of his recurring nightmares.) Muscle. Testosterone. Balls. Things she had in little or no supply. She was grunting just from holding up his little bitty butt right now, as light as he was. From the looks of this deserted storefront, the chances of finding this Mustafa were about as slim as Ramadan’s frame. If his zeal to find his father persisted, in the end he would be mostly on his own. She could give him a nudge and some encouragement. But that was about it. With her back, she just wasn’t cut out for this crap.

  Ramadan had watched, with envy, kids being lifted like this at parades, but no one had ever done it to him. So this was what he had missed! Up here, you could see the tops of things. Off to his right, the graffiti on top of a big red metal garbage bin read “S-P-L-A-T!” He sounded it out the way Mama Joon had taught him to do. Spuh-lat-tuh . . . Spuh-lat . . . Splat! He didn’t know what it meant, but he was pretty sure he was pronouncing it right. Pointing, he said, “Splat!”

  She arched her neck to see over the crest of his jeans-covered thigh.

  “What that mean?”

  “It means you better hold on tight, boy, that’s what it means.” Shuffling toward the window, she added, “Got me out here playing G.I. Joe.”

  Ramadan saw his own face, reflected in the pane, enlarging with each shaky step Mama Joon took.

  “Don’t know what you think you gonna find in there anyway. You heard the man. They’re gone.”

  With no room to inch any closer, she stopped. Her breath misted the glass. “Hurry up. I feel like a camel.”

  Ramadan leaned forward, imprinting the dusty windowpane with his fingers and palms. Then he pressed his face to the window, and his nose, lips, and chin flattened into a peculiar new visage, a sort of Basquiat boy, youthful and yearning, Ramadan at the Window. Peering out of his mushed face into the gloomy interior, he struggled to detect anything helpful, any evidence of his father, his family. Once replete with the necessities of daily life, the shelves, except for a few stray items scattered here and there, were empty. A sliver of sunlight caught dull patches of color here and there, but mostly he saw shadowy nothingness.

  Mama Joon’s right calf started to cramp. “Ramadan . . .”

  He recognized the tone. Impatience. With him.

  “Wait,” he pleaded, but he could feel her start to wobble.

  “Boy, my leg is killing me. Hold on.”

  Without any notion of how to bring him safely to the ground, she reached for his waist and let out a loud groan. Now her shoulder was tightening up, too. This child was just going to have to do another one of his fancy Nadia Comăneci moves and improvise his own damned dismount.

  As he descended about six inches, the sunlight his head had been blocking flooded the interior of the store. Mama Joon’s slumping was bringing him down to where the posters would be blocking his view, but his eyes, frantically probing, found the open door leading to Adad’s office. The back room caught just enough light to reveal the edge of a wooden desk; the curved arm of an office chair; a scatter of papers; and, resting atop the desk, the glint of something metallic or maybe just reflective.

  “Ah!” he said.

  But he had no time to process what he’d just seen, as Mama Joon, needing to attend to her leg, flung him from her neck and sent him flipping skyward.

  His rotating, topsy-turvy perspective tickled the fear of falling out of him. Mama Joon’s head whacked against the window, cracking but not shattering it, only a thin, vertical line forming on the glass. After one full somersault, Ramadan drifted toward the ground in a crouch, feet and hands prepared for the landing, which he accomplished gracefully. He looked up at Mama Joon, who had not fared as well. She was holding her head with both hands and trying to regain her balance.

  “Mama Joon!”

  When she turned to face him, her forehead and hands were splotched with blood.

  “Mama Joon!” He was stricken with the sudden premonition and terror of his grandmother’s death, flushed for the first time with the understanding, the certainty, that he would one day have to live without her. And this specific incident—his having knocked her over—convinced him that her death would somehow be his fault. In a fit of guilt and grief, he grabbed her around the waist. “Mama Joon . . . Mama Joon!”

  “I’m all right,” she said. She would have patted his head, but she didn’t want to stain him with her blood. “I’m all r
ight. It’s just a scratch.”

  A glance at her reflection in the window told her it wasn’t so bad. Only a wet patch and a trickle of blood remained on her forehead. She held her palms up to keep them away from Ramadan, who was still wailing and calling out her name.

  “Hush up now,” she said. “Hush up!”

  Personally, she wasn’t squeamish about seeing the liquid of life spill out, even her own. She had drained more blood from a fresh fryer. If anything, seeing this red on her hands gave her comfort, hope. She was still here, capable of bearing witness to this accidental flow, evidence of her existence. For a woman of somewhat questionable health, holding your life in your hands like this was a blessing, a cause for celebration. And what color! This blaze of cherry popping against the boring, even lifeless, neutrals of skin. This was life!

  Ramadan was still sobbing into her stomach, so she said again, “I’m all right!”

  He loosened his grip, and she dabbed her forehead with one of her sleeves.

  “Okay. Come on now. Let’s go. Go pick up Mama Joon’s purse for me.”

  Wanting to atone, he picked up the bag, dusted it off, and carried it for her.

  As they walked home, neither knew they had each just seen the way forward. But that slit on Mama Joon’s forehead was a crack in the doorway to her exit; her flowing blood, the ray of life, pointing to an enlightened ending. Ramadan had seen her ending, too—but its darkness had been punctured by that other vision—sunlight spilling into the office at the store. And that had impressed him as a beginning, a pathway to his blood.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT AT about ten o’clock, determined to return to the Quicky Mart, Ramadan crept down the hall and peeked into Mama Joon’s bedroom. She was asleep, with a towel on her forehead. He tiptoed to her and removed the damp compress, placing it on the bedside table. The bump on her head was no longer bleeding. As she moaned and turned over, she appeared to smile. Comforted by her comfort, he slipped quietly from the room.