A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

“Something like that.”

  Ramona planted her feet in the hay, pushing against the tire. She corrected a wobble and got it rolling toward Ernie’s car. Loose stones crunched under the tread, so she had to strain to hear their conversation.

  “I knew the mother,” Mr. Winslow said. “Hell of a thing, that accident. Never understood why the dad split town after. Just left her with the grandmother, and that one widowed herself. Goddamn hell of a thing, wasn’t it?”

  “Life’s tough, buddy. Best everyone just minds their business.”

  They dropped the tires off at Ms. Bacon’s shoebox apartment above the grocery store. Ernie rolled them under the wooden steps and gave them a satisfied kick, trotted up the stairs to the balcony and rapped on the door. He slipped inside and vanished for about ten minutes. When he came back downstairs, he had a smoke in his mouth and his toque in the back pocket of his jeans.

  “Guess she ain’t in,” he said, turning the key and avoiding her eyes. “Had to leave her a note.”

  Back at home, Ramona mixed cola, ginger ale, and chocolate fudge into a mason jar. She sat at the kitchen table and peeked through the flimsy blinds at Ernie in the backyard. He was out there swinging his dented aluminum bat, resting it over his shoulder as he left-hand lobbed a pebble into the air, then throwing his whole body into it, spine twisting above his hips. She heard the sharp clink of impact and the hiss of sliced air as the little stone went blasting into the woods behind her grandma’s house.

  The next morning, at Bible Study, Ramona wiped down the blackboards and swept the floors for Ms. Bacon. She scraped a chair over to the door and climbed up on top to reach the crucifix above the entrance. With a damp paper towel, she dabbed away the dust around Jesus’s wounds. Then she started sorting the bookshelves next to Ms. Bacon’s cluttered desk.

  A sunburned lady with her blond hair in a ponytail sat beside Ms. Bacon, the two of them flipping through a photo album and pouring over the pictures. Outside, snowflakes spun down from the sky. Ramona focused on the hum of the fluorescent lights, imagining she was in the engine room of a transatlantic cargo ship and not held captive by these two women in their pleated skirts and silk scarves, their chatter giddy and unending. Their voices sucked Ramona out of her daydreams and into their discussion, which detailed, exhaustively, the blond woman’s missionary travel to Zambia.

  “And how do you feel?” Ms. Bacon asked, all wide eyes and bouncing knees. “You know, spiritually? Is it a fresh start?”

  “We changed. I mean, the whole family changed right there in Lusaka, from the moment we started doing the work. Those people. That place. They don’t have a chance, you know, not even at the best of times. And for the disabled, I mean you can’t imagine the obstacles they face. We gave them answers and it changed us, Cindy. Our problems back here just pretty well packed up and moved out of town. You know? We were truly doing God’s merciful work. And He repaid us.”

  III.

  As the month went on, night fell earlier and pressed harder against the house. Wind blustered at the windows. It was her grandma’s third winter as a crazy person, and the darkness for her was like blackened clay. It became the shapes and contours of her mind, so that she was always screaming at the windows, always cocksucker and motherfucker, always incontinent, violent, stricken with tears and grief and mucus. Then she would lapse into long bouts of quiet reflection, at the dinner table when she was well enough to sit upright, in bed when she wasn’t, ropes of phlegm spilling over the middle of her lip as she stared into her void, until suddenly she would explode anew, sending great clots of rage tumbling through the air, and even raining blows across Ernie’s head and shoulders.

  One evening, she had an outburst in the bath while Ernie was sponging her. Ramona heard it before she saw it, the sound thumping through the door and bouncing around the house. She was standing in the kitchen, staring down the hall at the bathroom door, paint peeling off the wood around the doorknob. Underneath her feet, in the cellar, the cats were fighting, their eerie howls rising through the floorboards and making choir with the commotion in the bathroom.

  Then Ramona’s hand was on the doorknob, the reflection of her forehead huge and distorted, pigtails far behind her ears, the hinges groaning. Inside, Ernie was hunkered over the tub, his hair soaked and dangling in his eyes. The drain gasped as it sucked in water. Blood dripped from a gash in his cheek. Her grandma’s pasty, dappled calf hung over the edge of the tub, the sponge on the floor between them, suds sliding away from it, and Ernie with his face pale and his eyebrows standing high. When Ramona peered over his shoulder, she saw her grandma’s dentures bared, veins engorged, eyes bulging. Finger-bruises bloomed around her throat. The drain pipe sucked at her smoky grey hair, as if something deep in the earth wanted to inhale her.

  Ernie swayed to his feet. He pushed Ramona into the counter, stumbled out the front door and into the snow, steam rising from his hands. The police found him on the edge of town digging through snowdrifts up to his waist. The following Wednesday the local paper ran a picture of her grandma on the cover, not Ernie, even though they had his photo, too.

  That night, as the police were leaving, Ms. Bacon found Ramona in the cellar, where Poof lay bloodied, her chest heaving, and Bruises, with bits of flesh in his whiskers, stuck to the shadows of the far wall. Ramona said nothing when she saw him dart up the stairs and into the kitchen. She visualized him shooting between the feet of an exiting policeman, bounding through the tracks left by the gurney and out into the winter to fend for himself.

  “I wish your mother was here,” Ms. Bacon said. She crouched and pressed her palm against her forehead, smoothing the wrinkles around her watery eyes. Ernie’s toque hung out of her purse. “I wonder if God will forgive me for what I’ve done again. For the allegiances I’ve made again. The poor choices. Awful things, Ramona. I wonder if He really ever forgives them. Do you think?”

  Ramona’s head was like fog in the churchyard. She tried to stroke Poof, but the cat could not be touched without causing it pain. She swallowed a sob. Poof’s chest moved slower and slower. “I don’t think He really cares, Ms. Bacon.”

  “My child.” Ms. Bacon blew her nose with a crumpled tissue. “We will have to work hard to earn back His care. We will have to work very hard, and I know just what to do. Your mother would be so proud.” And then, tilting her head, seeming to notice for the first time that Poof lay there dying, she said: “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. Was she yours?”

  IV.

  The hole in front of Elijah’s compound swallows the sidewalk. Sometimes, in the morning, shirtless young men clamber inside and smash away with shovels and picks. Other times, it’s empty for days, and people skirt its edges on their way to work and back. No one seems to know its purpose. Elijah, who has been blind for all of his five decades and must, Ramona figures, be unable to distinguish the hole from the vast darkness of his mind, says that it’s a make-work project, one of the pointless things the government is doing with a bilateral loan so young Zambians who support it can make money for mounds of nshima and vats of Mosi beer. Ms. Bacon’s wrinkles have deepened even in the week since she and Ramona got here, and she orders Ramona to stay away from the hole, in case she falls inside and disappears.

  This has been Ms. Bacon’s approach to basically everything since they got to Lusaka. She fears the air, which is dry and sandy and clings to her as if she herself had been swallowed by the hole. She fears the noise on the streets: the minibus drivers cajoling fares from pedestrians; the dogs howling at each other over the compound walls; the passing pickups packed with singing workers; the men and women and children who stared at her the few times she actually did leave the house, clutching her purse as she hobbled along the cratered roadside in search of a hamburger. Throughout the night, she thrashes in bed beside Ramona, slapping at mosquitoes and craning to peer out the window whenever a rooster crows. In the mornings, oblivious to the change in time zones, she dials
the parish back home and lets the phone ring until the priest wakes up to take her call, trying his best to soothe her, telling her that they’re doing God’s work on behalf of the church and reassuring her that she’ll return to Canada before long, sanctified anew.

  “Ah, but she will be okay, isn’t it?” Elijah says when he hears Ramona walk into the living room. “It is just culture shock, enh? It is very common for mzungu when you first come here to Zambia. It has been happening for two hundred years or more. But still you come, don’t you? When she feels better, we will go to the Association and begin the work I want for you. Until such time, I will even keep you busy right here at home.”

  Elijah is the director of Zambia Christian Association for the Disabled. Ramona can’t help but note how disgusting he is, how badly he smells, how his eyes are blotchy white, like eggs squeezed through her grandma’s fists. The skin of his neck is patchy, dark and purple in some places, like bruises, and pale in others. He wears the same suit every day, a lumpy thing that billows dust whenever he drops his stocky frame into one of the three leather armchairs set up in a semi-circle in the centre of the living room. The buttons of his dress shirt strain, the fabric between them parts, and his hairy gut emerges like the obscene rump of an animal. He hunches over binders of brail, feverishly tracing his fingers over the letters and reciting pieces of legislation in English at the top of his lungs. When his phone rings, he gropes around the table, finds it, and starts blathering in another language, his eyeballs cloudy with cataracts. At noon, cane clattering, he exits the house and finds a four-door sedan, black and shiny, waiting for him outside the gate. Sometimes, he doesn’t come back until midnight.

  “You will be my daily rain season,” he told Ramona the morning they arrived, and so it’s her job to water the compound’s garden and fruit trees while Ms. Bacon tosses the day away. It’s an extravagant garden: tomato vines in raised beds, onions and peppers, rape and spinach. Fruit trees stretch through the waterless air above the vegetables, their branches laden with oranges, lemons, pawpaws, avocados. Ramona, who turned thirteen a month before they arrived, trails a thin length of green hose around the edges of the garden, up and down the hard-packed rows. She irrigates the cracked soil — it’s red; no, it’s orange; no, it’s adobe — and she bites her cheeks to conceal a smile, because, yes, indeed she is a little rain season, every single day, the one thing saving this garden from desiccated death. Her downpour smacks against the needy soil, vanishes into the earth and rises again through the stocks and trunks, swelling the fruits and vegetables she picks every day, alternating between crops and then displaying them on the kitchen counter or packing them into the crispers of the double-wide fridge. Then she sweeps the floor and cleans the dishes from the day before.

  Ramona spends mornings lying in the garden, her back pressed against the freshly wetted soil. Butterflies spiral and dive above her. Wind shakes water from the plants and mists her forehead. Birds call from tree branches. Elijah claims to know each species by song, but he won’t tell her which is which. He says she has to prove herself first. What she wants to know most is the name of the tree in the centre of the yard, tall and without leaves, but with bundles of light-purple flowers, tissue petals shaped into flutes. He says he can recognize the trees by their smell. But education has its premiums.

  In the afternoon, after her harvest, she slices oranges for Ms. Bacon. She shreds rape and spinach and makes an arrangement on the bottom of one of Elijah’s flower-trimmed bowls. On top she spreads chopped tomatoes and onions, plus a mound of mashed avocado. These are not like the salads her grandma taught her to make when she was little, back when her grandma could still teach. These salads are exotic, the bounty of a class system Ramona has never seen before.

  She brings these meals to Ms. Bacon, who even in the high heat of afternoon, lies twisted in her bedsheets, sweating stains into the mattress. Ramona studies Ms. Bacon’s lips, cracked like the soil, as they pucker against a slice of orange. This image, those dried-out lips, they’re like the dream she had of burying her grandma last spring, after the snow had melted and her freezer-burned body was taken out of storage for the funeral.

  “I’m so weak, Ramona.” Ms. Bacon whines when she talks. She sniffles and swipes at her nose with her cracked knuckles. “Too weak to be useful. God, I wish your mom were here instead of me. She would’ve never gotten involved with the despicable likes of Ernie, you know. She was always better, your mother. Despite her flaws. Despite your father.”

  “It’s okay,” says Ramona, smoothing her godmother’s damp and lifeless hair. “I made you a salad.”

  Ms. Bacon smiles. Her face says, What would I do without you?

  Ramona shrugs, thinking, Probably die.

  There’s a sucking sound, mashed avocado smacking against the roof of an ageing woman’s mouth. “How are things with Elijah?”

  “He stinks.”

  “Ramona! He probably has difficulty bathing. The poor man is blind. And it’s so bloody hot. Maybe he can’t see the soap. Or maybe he’s afraid of standing in the tub, you know, in case he falls. You should be helping him. That’s why we’re here.”

  Ramona sticks her finger down her throat, pretends to gag. “He already thinks I’m his maid. I don’t want his penis to be the first one I ever see.”

  Ms. Bacon rises up in her sheets, the ceiling fan blowing at her star-spangled night shirt. She poises herself to say something, a stern look passing over her face, but sighs heavily instead, her finger floating in the air like lost punctuation. “Look, child, the parish speaks very highly of Elijah and the Association. They have a long relationship. Just do what he tells you. I’ll be better by tomorrow morning and we’ll go there together and get some work done.”

  V.

  Another week passes, but Ms. Bacon doesn’t leave the room. She’s been reading the crime sections of the daily newspapers, recording in her notebook the cases of defilement, robbery, murder, assault. The floor of the room is carpeted in loose sections of newsprint, with ghastly photos of violence and death throbbing up at the ceiling fan. She presents Ramona with the full-colour image of a strangled woman and asks if her grandma looked similar, squeezed into the bottom of the tub. At night, Ms. Bacon kneels in front of the bed and murmurs the “Our Father,” and maybe she’s losing her sense of modesty because she doesn’t cover her upper thighs, where the scars from the car accident are still raised and red, thirteen years after the fact. She’s seen cockroaches crawling up and down the nightstand she uses to stack her salad bowls, and she sheepishly asks Ramona to bring the plates to the kitchen after she’s done eating. Their fat brown bodies are terrifying, like living bombshells.

  Ramona hasn’t told her about the utility worker who died in the hole at the beginning of the week: a speeding minibus collided with a water tanker, causing a deluge; the man was buried in heavy sheets of cracked earth suddenly turned into sliding mud. Neighbours have brought flowers to the lip of the hole. They wait and hope his body will emerge as the ground sucks up the water. Elijah says the man was a well-known Satanist and that the women in colourful headscarves are praying for God to have mercy on his soul. He smirks. “Soon,” he says in a low voice, “they will start slaughtering fowls in the street.”

  It’s Friday morning and the roosters are crowing. Ms. Bacon is kneeling in front of the bed, praying softly, and Ramona is half asleep, listening to her godmother beg for answers while her mother wriggles in ghostly apparition, floating above them, broad and flat like plywood. A knock on the door wakes her fully, dissolving the phantom, and sends Ms. Bacon leaping into bed, hiding her shrunken self in the covers.

  But it’s only Elijah. “Ms. Bacon, permit me to disturb you, please. I will need to bring the parish’s donation to the church today, please. Sorry for the disturbance, I beg you.”

  In the hallway, Ramona hands him an envelope stuffed with Canadian dollars and Elijah tells her that she will not be producing her
customary rain season in the garden. Not this morning. “Together, we will go to the Association for a very important meeting. Yes, very, very important for disabled people in Zambia here. A business development proposal from the deaf, isn’t it? So let us just leave the rain season for tomorrow. The garden will survive without you.”

  “And then after, will you tell me the name of that tree?”

  “Ho-ho! We shall see, Ramona. We shall see based on the work you get done today.”

  The black car is waiting outside the gate. The driver hops out to open the door for Elijah, but he doesn’t bother for Ramona’s. He studies her a moment through the opaque lenses of his aviator sunglasses, then he runs a palm over the breast of his blazer and sits behind the wheel.

  After a few turns, Ramona gets disoriented. The city is a warren of bustling streets and compound walls, bicycles trailing dust along the roadside. The mystery trees without leaves branch into the air and offer bouquets of purple flowers to the bright blue sky. Beyond them, she sees the soaring buildings of the downtown core. When the driver turns off the paved roads, the car bounces and clatters down rutted dirt, cinderblock homes and wooden kiosks looming in their path, a small mesh-wire box full of yellow chicks balanced on someone’s head, men smoking and drinking beer, grimacing as they sand bookshelves, women roasting cobs of corn on blackened grills, counting money behind vegetable kiosks. If Elijah were to let her off here, Ramona knows, she’d be lost forever.

  She reaches across the air-conditioned space between them, taps him on the shoulder. “Where are we?”

  “Ah, child,” he says, stumpy fingers twiddling round the top of his cane. “Me, I know well by counting the turns and the seconds between them. But you, suppose if I told you the name of the neighbourhood, what sense would it even make to your mzungu ears?”