Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Traceleen got up from her knees and gathered up her purse and went out onto Athens Street and started walking toward the streetcar stop. The little pregnant girl on the porch next door sat up on the swing and saluted. A black dog uncurled and stood up and sniffed the air. Her nephew Richard was walking her way, dressed up and looking sober. He was the youngest son of her second sister, Katie Blue, and was currently the blight and stigma of the family’s life. He was the leader of the New Orleans branch of the Bloods. He had been one of its founders. That was after he was a star basketball player in junior high. He hadn’t started getting in trouble until the ninth grade. The same year Katie Blue got cancer and turned her face to the wall and told her children to fend for themselves.

  “Hey, Auntee Traceleen,” he called out. “Long time, no see.”

  “I’m on my way to work, Richard. I got to catch the streetcar.”

  “You still working for the Weisses, Auntee?”

  “I got my job and I’m happy with it.” She stood on the sidewalk inspecting him. He wasn’t wearing any of his gang symbols. He had on a shirt and tie. Either he had quit or he had come to ask a favor. He was in the habit of asking favors of Traceleen. He had lived with her after his mother got sick. He had lived with her until he joined the Bloods. Sometimes Traceleen blamed herself for Richard’s getting into trouble. But that was always in the afternoons. In the morning she was too smart to blame herself for troubles people made for themselves.

  “I just come by to tell you I was leaving town pretty soon.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Oh, down to the Virgin Islands for a while, then to South America.”

  “What do you want, Richard? What are you up to?”

  “I need a lawyer. I was wondering if you might ask Mr. Weiss if he’d talk to me this afternoon. You going over there now? Maybe I’ll just come along.”

  “No. Don’t do that. I’ll ask him for you. What you need him for?”

  “I just need some things looked into by a lawyer. Some deeds to property and some things. I might have to put a piece of real estate in your name. You wouldn’t mind that, would you? Auntee Mandana said you were trying to get a new house. You could use it to get your loan.”

  “I don’t want anything bought with dope money. I don’t drink the blood of children. Come on, Richard. Don’t stand in my way. I got to catch the trolley.”

  “Where can I find you later? So I can find out about Mr. Weiss.” He stood there waiting. She opened her purse and took out a little pink notebook Crystal Anne had given her for a love present and wrote down a telephone number and an address. “I’ll be here until noon. Then I’m going over to King’s house to take care of the baby. King had a baby boy. He got married. Did I tell you that?”

  “Yeah. You told me. Well, ladeedah. I guess that makes you and your white buddies happy, doesn’t it? Now you got you a white baby to nurse.”

  “I nursed plenty of both colors. You’re the only one that’s broken my heart. Get out of my way, Richard. I’m going to the streetcar stop.” She closed her purse and walked down the sidewalk. Richard was walking behind her. Don’t let harm come to a human being on the earth today, Traceleen prayed. If it’s got to be anyone, let it be me.

  She turned and faced him. “Go over to my house and see your Uncle Brown and help him get off to work,” she said. “Go be nice to people, son.”

  “I’ll talk to you later, Auntee Traceleen. I’ll call you in an hour or so.” She walked on to the streetcar stop and Richard turned and went back down the street. So King Mallison got him a baby boy, he thought. He was remembering when Traceleen took him to the Weisses to visit one morning when he was fifteen years old and King was thirteen. King had taken him to his room and tried to sell him a joint. “I got this stuff yesterday in the park,” King had said. “I’d give it to you if I could, but I owe this guy about thirty dollars. Sit down, have some M&M’s.” King shut the door to his room and sat down beside Richard on the bed. “This room’s a mess but I’m going to get all this junk out of here as soon as I get a water bed. They made this place for me out of the basement. It’s a dungeon.” Richard looked around him. The room was full of hamster and gerbil cages and aquariums. There were three cages of hamsters and one of gerbils and an aquarium with two nasty-looking fish swimming around, chasing each other through a plastic castle. There was a yellow rug on the floor and the walls were painted blue. There were jars by the bed with M&M’s and lollipops. King held out the M&M jar. He turned on a tape player and Bob Dylan started singing “Mr. Bojangles.” Richard took the M&M’s and started eating them, one by one.

  “I don’t smoke that shit,” he said. “You better be careful with that shit, King. That shit can get you in a whole lot of trouble.”

  “I’m not worried.” King lay back on the bed. He turned over on his stomach and brought a tin box out from underneath the bed. He sat up and opened it and began to get out paraphernalia.

  “Richard.” It was Traceleen calling from the stairs. “Come on back up here, honey. We got to go now.”

  “Let me know if you want to buy any.” King stood in the doorway holding out the M&M’s. “I’m right here if you change your mind. You know my phone number.”

  I might just have to go see old King, Richard decided. See how he’s getting along now he’s got himself a wife and baby. He’s always been a friend to me. He always comes over and talks to me if I run into him at Tip’s or down in the Quarter. I hadn’t seen him around in a while though. He must be laying low since he got married.

  He shook his head and started up the steps of the house Crystal and Manny had bought for Traceleen to get her out of the project. His uncle was in the kitchen making coffee and getting ready for the day. His uncle wasn’t as kind to him as his aunt had been. “Well, the dope king done come by to see us,” his uncle said. “The devil has come by to pay a visit. Howdy, devil. Have a seat. Tell me what you got to say.”

  “Nothing to you. That’s for sure.”

  “What you come by for, Richard?”

  “Auntee Traceleen said to come by and see how you were doing. So now I’ll leave.” Richard stared into his uncle’s face, so unforgiving and so strong. So wide and deep and cold, like the Mississippi River, Richard decided. You could drown in there. “I hear the white folks are buying you another house. That so?”

  “That’s your auntee’s doing. It’s none of me.” His uncle backed down. Whatever was coming next he didn’t want to hear. He had worked all his life at a hard job, unloading cargoes on the docks, then bossing the crew that did. Still, the house was Traceleen’s, a gift from her white people. He didn’t want to hear about it and Richard was about to say it. “You gonna end up in Angola, Richard. Or dead. You better stop all that shit you’re doing and let me help you get a job.”

  “I got a job.” Richard looked around the room, at his uncle’s union badge on the dresser, at his aunt’s paintings her white friend in California had made for her, at the old bedspread where he had knelt to say his prayers when he lived with them. He softened up. He wasn’t going to be mean to his uncle. It wasn’t worth the trouble. “I got to get out of here,” he added. “I got some work to do.” He looked his uncle in the eye and waited, but his uncle did not move to touch him, did not deign to smile, did not care about or love him. “Goodbye, then,” Richard said. “Tell Mandana’s girls hello if you see them.” He walked out of the room and down the front steps and across the yard. Leave the old people to themselves, he decided. Who needs them anyway?

  Chapter 45

  MISS those girls like my left arm,” Daniel was saying. “Left and right arm.” He was watching Spook, who was packing his clothes to move to the farm. An open suitcase was on the bed and Spook was slowly and deliberately folding shirts and putting them carefully into the suitcase. “You don’t need to take them off the hangers. Just carry them out there on the hangers, Spook. Why are you folding them up?”

  “You got to let them go,” Spook said. “I’
m getting tired of telling you that, Daniel. You act like they was some little wives you had that went off and left you for other men. Quit thinking about them. You need to get you a new wife and start you a life of your own. Mooning around here drinking whiskey every night. Letting everything go to pot.”

  “It’s gone to pot. I’d sell that business this afternoon if I could come out even. But I can’t. The economy’s bust and I’m bust. You don’t know a thing about children, because you never had any. You never invested your heart in a child. What do you know?”

  “That’s another thing. Getting out all them pictures of them when they was little and setting them up everywhere. Quit living in the past, Daniel. You’re only forty-seven years old and you act like you’re a hundred. Your granddaddy was the same way, the one you favor. You’re turning into past people.” Spook lay a white shirt down on top of a blue-and-white-striped one and looked Daniel in the eye. “Look at me, boss. If you got to come out here and stand around when I’m busy, at least act like you’re listening when I talk.”

  “I’m listening. I was thinking maybe I’d move out to the farm too. Sell this goddamn house and clear on out if they won’t even come and visit.”

  “Olivia came for the Fourth of July. Correct me if I’m mistaken. Did she or did she not come here for four days and scarcely left this house?”

  “Four days out of a whole summer.”

  “You going back to work this afternoon, or not?”

  “Yeah. I’m going back right now. If Margaret comes by to get the vacuum cleaner, let her in.” Daniel turned and walked out onto the patio and lit a cigarette and stood underneath the walnut tree thinking over the conversation. Hell, maybe he’d charter a plane and fly down to New Orleans and apologize. Except it would cost at least a thousand dollars and that was half a month’s payment on one of the loans. So that was out. Spook came up behind him.

  “You got a cigarette, boss?”

  “Sure. Have one of these.” Daniel extended a package of Camels and Spook took one and lit it and went over and sat down on the stone steps.

  “I’m sorry I’m leaving you. And I’m sorry for what I said in there. I know you’re hurting.”

  “I am hurting. I’m hurting real bad.” He went over and sat down beside the black man and they smoked in peace for a while. Then Daniel got up and put his hand on Spook’s shoulder. “It’s the lowest of the low for me,” he said at last. “It’s the worst summer I can remember.”

  After Daniel left, Spook went back into the guest house and began to take the shirts out of the suitcase. He couldn’t leave him now. He was standing by his closet shaking his head and trying to get a train of thought going, when Margaret came walking out onto the patio from the kitchen calling to him.

  “He’s in a bad way,” Spook said, coming out his door. “We got to do something about him if we love him. It’s gone as far as I can let it go. Call Niall on the phone and tell him to get on over here and help us think.”

  “Good,” Margaret said. “He’s lost his spark, Spook. He won’t even kiss me. I know I’m not Miss America, but at least he used to find some comfort in my arms.”

  An hour later Niall, Margaret, Spook, Daniel’s nephew James, who was the Alcoholics Anonymous expert in the family, and Helen’s ex-husband, Spencer Abadie, were in the kitchen planning a surprise. “It’s called an intervention,” James was saying. “We gang-bang him and break through his defenses. I think we ought to do it. We ought to do it tonight.”

  “He’s getting so depressed,” Margaret said. “I wouldn’t put anything past him, the mood he’s in.”

  “Okay,” Niall put in. “I’m for it. I’ll go along.”

  “We could bring Farley in from the farm,” Spook said. “He’ll tell him what it’s like to never know from one day to the next what’s going to get done.”

  “Okay,” James said. “Tonight. Definitely tonight.” He was excited. He had always wanted to be part of an intervention. He felt like his whole life had been moving toward this day. Now, on his slender young shoulders, the fate of his family would ride to victory or defeat.

  “James?”

  “Yes. Sir.”

  “Don’t get carried away, you hear.”

  “We may need a straitjacket. Sometimes they try to run away. We have to have people stationed at the doors. We have to immobilize all vehicles. And we need to either tie him or get him in a jacket.”

  “We ain’t putting him in no jacket.” Spook stood up. “We get him in a room and we say our piece. I’m all for that. But we ain’t going to tie him up or try to get a straitjacket on him. Not that any of us could do it anyway, if we really made him mad.”

  “Well, that’s the recommended way. He’ll leave when it gets painful if we don’t restrain him.”

  “Restrain him, my ass. You ever try to restrain Daniel? He’s six feet four inches tall. You couldn’t restrain him if there were fourteen of you.”

  James put his arm on the mantelpiece. “You’re supposed to have a hospital ready for them to go to. The police are supposed to be standing by. It’s an intervention. There’re supposed to be doctors and people standing by in the reception room. It isn’t supposed to just be a lot of people going to talk to someone.”

  “You mean, you want us to arrest Daniel? That’s what you’re saying now? Think thou because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale,” he added, just to see if James would catch on.

  “We’re not serving anything alcoholic tonight,” James said. He sat down beside Niall and thought about how much he had always hated Spook. It was black people like Spook who made racial hatred. Spook was as bad as Jesse Jackson. Why did all the worst black people always have to come from the Carolinas? James had wondered that before. The most uppity, snottiest, ungrateful black people in the United States always came from right here. I think we got the meanest tribes, James decided, and sat back beside his uncle.

  “At seven o’clock then,” Margaret said. “Here, in this house, at seven.”

  “At seven,” Niall agreed. “Try to get here early.”

  “What will we say we’re doing? What do we say when he says, ‘What are you all doing here?’”

  “Coming to say we’re worried about you and want to let you know it.” Niall had taken over now. “We say, ‘Daniel, we are moving in for a night or two. We are here because we love you.’”

  “Good,” everyone agreed. “Good. That’s a good idea. A good, good plan.”

  At seven that night they were all gathered in the living room waiting for Daniel to appear. Spook stood by the door to the kitchen. He had made Jade get out things for soft drinks and had a pot of coffee going. “Don’t guess we can offer anyone a drink?” he had told Niall, so the two of them sneaked a glass of brandy in the pantry, then locked the liquor cabinet door.

  Margaret was seated on the sofa. She had her head bowed and her hands in her lap. She really loved Daniel Hand, and she figured after this she would never have another love of any kind, might even have to go to India to help Mother Teresa with her work.

  Spencer Abadie sat on a blue chair leafing through a back issue of Forbes magazine. James marched back and forth in front of the picture windows memorizing his speech. The truth will make you free, he chanted to himself. One day at a time. We will help you. There are places to go. We are offering you your life. Sit down with us and start to talk.

  “What in the hell is this?” Daniel said, coming into his living room. “Something happened? Something happened to my girls?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Niall said. “We came to talk to you, Daniel. Sit down a minute. Let me have a minute. We came here because we’re worried about you.”

  “Goddamn, Niall, give me a minute. Let me get a drink.” Daniel started loosening his tie. He had had a very, very bad day, with creditors calling every hour and people that owed him money refusing to pay.

  “No drinks, Uncle Daniel,” James said. “We came to talk to you about drinking. We came to beg yo
u to let us help you save your life.”

  “Oh, my God. Margaret, are you in this, too? You mixed up in this?”

  “I’m mixed up in you. I love you. I won’t stand by and watch you kill yourself.”

  “Sit down, Daniel.” Niall went to him and took his arm. “Come sit by me. Let us have our say. I beg you, let us say what we came to say.”

  “Spook, get me a drink of Scotch.” Daniel sat down on the sofa beside Margaret. She was twisting a scarf in her hands. She raised her eyes and looked at him and began to cry. Spook moved in from the door. Spencer moved his chair closer to the sofa. They encircled him. James began to make his plea. “There is a place in Atlanta you can go to,” he began. “It’s better than the one I went to. We are offering you our help, Uncle Daniel. We love you. We want to fight for you. Don’t hate us. Don’t get up. Don’t fight back. For just a little while say you will listen.”

  “Start talking.” Daniel sat back. Then, strangely, because she was so sad, he reached over and took Margaret’s hand and held it. “Say what you came to say.”

  Many hours later Margaret and Daniel were upstairs in the master bedroom. They had made love for the first time in all the months they had fucked each other. Now they lay upon their backs and talked in whispers. “I’m not much of a catch,” Daniel was saying. “But I could settle down if I ever got this business off my back. That’s what you want, for me to settle down?”

  “I want you to go to this place in Atlanta. If you still want me then, I want to live with you. You won’t want me then. If you get well, you won’t want me for a thing.”