by David Haynes
Who could even feed their dog?
I run up the hill to Miss Ida’s. The store is full of neighbors. They stop talking when I come in the door. I nod “good evening“—the whole polite boy routine—and duck back to the frozen foods. I don’t even think I know some of these folks, and what made them all come to the store tonight anyway. Over her glasses Miss Ida gives me one of those looks you give to sick people. I want to go up there and tell them all to mind their own damn business.
Instead, I reach in and get two Jeno’s Pizzas. Large. Pepperoni. I tell Miss Ida to put them on my tab. She wants to know since when have I got myself a tab; she waves me out the door with them anyway. She says “take care” in a way that makes me want to scream.
I run home and dump the pizzas into the oven. They should be ready when Sam comes in. I sit in front of the TV and try to act normal.
When Big Sam comes in I see his face in the mirror. He says nothing. He throws his coat across a chair, and I get up to hang it in the closet.
“Leave it,” he says.
So there I’m standing with his coat, looking foolish.
He walks down the short hall and looks in the bedroom. Then in the bathroom. Finally the kitchen, the utility room, out the back windows.
“Do you want a beer?” I ask.
He opens the refrigerator and gets himself a beer. He sits down and puts his feet up on one of the yellow upholstered dinette chairs.
“I made us some pizza,” I say. I’m standing on the living room side of the pass-through-bar. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
“You get to school today?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any calls? Mail?”
“No, sir.”
I go in and take the pizza from the oven and then cut them up in triangles like they show on the commercials. I set one pizza on a potholder, get down two plates, and make myself a glass of Kool-Aid.
I sit down across from Sam and try to eat a piece of pizza. I have to put it down. The pizza burns my tongue, and he is staring at me.
Staring and staring, so I look down at the pizza waiting for it to cool. We sit this way for about a century.
*
Sam gets up without touching the pizza. He takes another beer and goes in front of the TV. I try again to eat some of the food. Under each piece of pizza a puddle of yellow grease has congealed like snot. I drink the Kool-Aid and put the pizzas in the fridge for another time. I eat Oreo Chip ice cream directly from the box.
I sit on the plaid couch across from Big Sam who is in his chair. Big Sam’s chair is a six position, crushed-velvet, orange, vibrating Wall-away recliner. He sits in position one, straight-backed, staring at the TV, not watching a rerun of the Jeffersons. Sam never sits in position one.
“Well,” he says, taking a swig off the beer.
“Well,” I say.
He sighs and rubs his big hand through his nappy salt-and-pepper hair. His eyes when he looks at me are liquid and empty.
“It’ll be okay,” I say.
He looks back at the TV and takes another swig of the beer.
“I can always get dinner,” I say.
He makes a noise like a snuffling pig, smiles, though it is really a sneer.
“I can. I just need money for groceries. Miss Ida’ll give me a tab …”
“This ain’t none of her business.”
“I didn’t say nothing to her. I wouldn’t.”
I didn’t tell him she probably already knew. Everyone else in Washington Park, too.
For a while it is quiet again.
Eventually Sam says, “No matter.”
I don’t understand, but I keep talking anyway. “We’ll be okay. You’ll see.”
Sam empties the beer can, crushes it, and drops it clanging onto the shattered table top. He stands looming over me a good long while, looking down at me over his nose, his lips, his big belly. He turns and walks from the room, saying, “Boy, you don’t know shit.”
3
SATURDAY MORNING following Rose’s big exit scene, about ten, I’m on my way out the door. The boys and I are taking the bus to Chesterfield Mall. They got some nice stuff out there: movie theaters, a video arcade, a McDonald’s. We never run out of things to do.
They also have every kinda store you’d want ever, but we don’t do much shopping. Artie already has more matching outfits than Barbie herself. Really. Even his socks match. All Todd ever wears are jeans and a T-shirt. Also this army jacket with the name Dawson sewn over the pockets. Todd’s name is Lawrence. I asked once who this Dawson is, but Todd just shrugged his shoulders and asked how in the hell was he supposed to know. Sometimes Todd wears a different color T-shirt. The khaki green jacket goes well with his red hair. Often his clothes look clean. There’s something rather homemade about them. You get the idea if you pulled a string he’d unravel.
As for me, I wear whatever I wear. Much closer to Todd’s taste in that sense. Rose, bless her heart, collects old and new clothes from garage sales. Always something different and new in the dresser. Sometimes the garage sale stuff is ironed, which means that the white ladies over in the subdivision ironed it before they put it out for sale. Rose doesn’t believe in ironing. Says if God meant women to iron she wouldn’t have invented permanent press.
Before I leave I take a look around the joint. In our crackerbox house things have moved from cluttered toward filthy in five days flat, but I’ve gotten the message loud and clear: “Leave it.” So I have. The whole house has turned into a garbage pit. The kitchen sink is stacked high with piles of plates, sticky with grape jelly. There are Burger King bags and cups and boxes on every counter. In the bathroom on the floor layer after layer of mildewed towels lie crumpled in the corner. And there are beer cans everywhere. Only in my own room have I been able to keep some control on the clutter, rounding up my clothes and sneaking them to the utility room for a quick wash when Sam’s back is turned.
“Leave those damned clothes be, boy,” he’d shout if he caught me. I swear, this house will smell of year-old cheese before Sam backs down. Meanwhile let’s hope the authorities don’t catch wind of us.
No chance of that. After all: Big Sam is the mayor of Washington Park. Well, technically there is no such place as Washington Park, so there really isn’t such a thing as a mayor. What Washington Park is, is half-a-hundred prefabbed crackerbox palaces just like this one on three cul-de-sacs (as the more uppity residents call them), four dead ends, and two main streets. Guess what one of the main streets is called? Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. It’s about two blocks long. It has potholes. It has a storm sewer outlet. It has a two-way stop. Sometimes I think that Dr. King must be spinning in his grave over all the King Drives everywhere. Our King Drive is a dead end. Really.
Don’t look for Washington Park on any map. From Colerain Road you see only overgrown brush, scraggly trees, Miss Ida’s store. Way off in the distance you can see the Missouri River and Saint Charles County. We are completely invisible from the fancy stuck-up-the-ass subdivisions of Fox Trails and Greenbriar. Think they don’t like it that way? Washington Park is halfway down a hollow, a hollow winding to the flood plain. Only the P.W.T. (poor white trash, Todd’s people) live further out on the plain, across the tracks down Dorset—truck farmers and river rats, they are.
Rose says they put the white trash further down the hill because as much as your ordinary garden variety white person hates “us,” they hate P.W.T. worse. They’re embarrassing, she says. Rose says that P.W.T. never throw anything away because they think their even trashier relatives from Arkansas and Kentucky who come up here by the truckloads might need it. She says that all sorts of shameful stuff goes on down there, stuff a person such as herself does not discuss.
Sam says the P.W.T. are harmless; just hard-working poor folk.
Which is about the same as what Todd would say about them if he were ever to say anything about them at all.
Rose says to be careful around that Todd boy anyway.
/> Washington Park is also the big landfill, the junkpile on Colerain Road. Sam Finney: proprietor. Clean fill only, please. Ten dollars a truckload. Rotten appliances and rotten roofs, light bulbs, dirt, your old couch. Clean—but enough banana peels to keep the rats happy. Washington Park garbage mostly. Local trash pickup, snow removal, and street maintenance also available.
Trash man, street cleaner: those are Sam’s jobs. That makes him the mayor of Washington Park.
Sam reports to some white folks over at the Saint Louis County office—that little brick box on King Drive. Them white folks don’t live down here, but they come around now and then. They tell Sam when to plow the street, when to turn on the sprinklers. They check on life up at the dump. They bring Sam a paycheck once or twice a month, and mostly they leave him alone. He does what he sees fit. There’s a high redwood fence on the Colerain side of the dump. It stretches along all above Washington Park. Sam says the man prefers not to be reminded. They don’t even really know we’re down here at all, he says, and he also says that that’s fine with him: for the best. So long as they leave us alone and we got a roof over our heads. He’ll keep the roads paved and clean, and we’ll keep to ourselves. Poor folks, black folks, we’ve always taken best care of ourselves. We are here, and out there is someplace else entirely. That’s what Sam says.
Every once in a while he has to go out and break up some little scuffle, or fuss some kids out of the playground. One time—a Saturday—some older dudes were playing ball down in the park. Well, things developed, and by and by a near riot broke out because somebody fouled somebody or somebody bent the hoop. Rose came in hollering, “Get up! Get up! Got some big trouble down the hill.” Sam’s laid out on the couch, sound asleep like on every Saturday afternoon. He stumbles up and grabs his shotgun. He runs on down there. Everybody in Washington Park was out watching this mess. Sam gets down there and fires his gun, in the air a couple of times. Everybody freezes. Them boys circle each other a few more times, but they got the message. They went on home.
“Well, that’s that,” Sam said.
He’s the mayor, I guess, and sort of the sheriff, too.
Unfortunately the mayor’s been a little under the weather this week. And who rules the roost while the rooster’s got the blues?
*
As I said, I’m on my way out the door Saturday morning to meet the boys, when behind me I hear, “Just a minute, there,” and I turn around and there’s Sam wearing some greasy old overalls over his pajamas.
I’m just going out for a minute,” I say. Sam tosses me a red leather-like address book which I recognize instantly as belonging to Rose.
“Call around and see what you can find out,” he says, and then he turns back toward his waist-high-in-clutter-and-filth bedroom.
What’s the deal here?
I go to his bedroom door. He is in there rooting around, tossing junk from one pile to the next.
“Sir,” I say, idly turning the address book as if I don’t know what it is.
“Look,” he says, waving hands around, “Start with the relatives. Call everybody in the goddamn book if you have to.”
“Aren’t people going to suspect something?”
“Not if you use that big head of yours. Get started. Let me know.”
Great. All of a sudden I’m a private detective.
I get a brainstorm. I call up Artie. Miss Ida answers, which tells me he’s down at Betty’s. I hang up without saying anything and call him down there. Betty Lou’s raspy-sweet voice answers, so I hang up again. I wait a minute or two, tapping on the receiver with my fingers.
“I don’t hear calling out there,” Sam says.
I call Artie back.
“Yes, uh, hello. This is your cousin from Saint Louis calling, Marshall Finney.”
“My sister don’t appreciate you playing on the phone, man.”
“Nice speaking to you also. Yes. The reason I’m calling is that something has come up and I’m wondering if you could give me some information.”
“Big Sam’s standing behind you. You can’t talk.”
“Yes, ma’am, that is correct.”
“I hope this don’t mean you can’t go to the movies.”
I laugh one of those polite telephone laughs that Rose always does.
“This is something to do with your mom running off, right?”
“I’ll be sixteen in March.”
“We’ll spring you. I’ll make Betty invite you for lunch. Sam can’t say no to Betty. Hang in a few minutes.” Artie slams down the phone.
I keep right on. “Yes I was wondering if you’d heard anything from my mother lately.”
Pause.
“No she’s not exactly missing or anything. She’s got that amnesia thing.”
Pause.
“Please call us if you hear anything.” Pause.
“Thanks. I hope to see you soon, too. Bye.”
“Who was that?” Sam wants to know. He’s standing right there behind me.
“Cousin Reva,” I tell him. I don’t have any cousin Reva. “You remember. Rose’s cousin Melba’s second girl.”
The bluff works: Sam don’t know half his own relatives. Says all them hens are alike to him.
“Get back to work,” he orders. “And lose that amnesia shit.”
Swell.
So I start through alphabetically:
MISS ELSIE FAY ANDERSON—the queen of Park Baptist Church which Rose attends, but on Easter Sunday and Founder’s Day only.
GREAT AUNT ROSALIE BURTON—Rose’s namesake. She has a lot of money and is extremely senile.
MR. CHARLES-Rose’s hairdresser.
COUSIN THELMA COLLINS—loves Sam, hates Rose, a spiteful witch, according to Ma.
UNCLE LUTHER DIGGS—looks white, talks white, thinks he’s white, depressed, depressing.
Thirty-two calls at least I make. “Oh, dear,” a lot of them say. “Finally,” is a popular comment with the women relatives.
I call my cousin Sheila.
“Sheila, you seen my mom?”
She just laughs. She is just a few years older than me. Where she gets off being so haughty I’ll never know.
“What’s so funny?” I want to know.
“Come on, cuz. Give it up. She and big daddy having a little tiff, ain’t they?”
“Just tell me if you’ve seen her.”
“Ya’ll just chill. You know the poem: leave her alone and she’ll come home.”
“Thanks for nothing.” I hang up on her and continue down the list.
I tell some of them that Rose went to the store and we need to talk to her before she comes home and we were just calling in case she happened to stop by on the way. Some I tell that she went on a cross-country driving trip and we’d heard there was some sort of a big storm in their area and we wanted to know if they’d heard from her. Some I just ask if my mama’s there.
No one is fooled: I can tell by how they treat me on the phone. They say things like “we haven’t heard yet” and “I know how you must be feeling.” Things that make my ears burn and my face hot. Behind our backs I know the family gossip network is alive with Sam’s name and Rose’s name and my name, too. That pisses me off. Like I want my name hooked up in some mess like this. She was so eager to get herself up and out of here, did she take a minute to think about me? Hell no. All she saw was the door, the way out, and Sam and me be damned. And here I am on the phone begging for information. I feel like a fool. Never again.
When the phone rings Sam charges out, hitching up his overalls, the desperation piercing his eyes. He nods for me to pick it up.
“Betty wants to know if I can come for lunch with Artie.”
Sam’s face falls behind its stony mask. I feel foolish and petty.
“You called everyone?”
I nod, too ashamed to speak.
“That girl. What has she done now?” He shakes his head. “What has she got herself into?” He sees me watching him. He cocks his head to indicate I ca
n go.
“Maybe Betty’s heard something,” I offer, but from Sam there is no reply.
*
All of the houses in Washington Park are painted cheerful pastels—pink, pale green, baby blue—and the shutters are spotless white, even though they are only plywood fakes, serving no purpose, shutting nothing from nowhere. Betty Lou Warner’s house, the one she shares sometimes with Artie, just may be the most cheerful of all. It is painted a bright lavender color and surrounded most of the year by oceans of flowers and blooming bushes. Then, at Christmas, Betty Lou’s festival of lights—which includes a life-sized manger scene with a light up baby Jesus—outdoes even the shopping malls; it glows through the night almost until the first tulips pop up in the early spring.
Betty’s a fun girl. Just about any afternoon and often on the weekend you find Artie there in the almost purple house at the top of Woodlawn Street, a short hill of a street that dead-ends into an overgrowth of scrub trees. Artie’s room is up at Miss Ida’s store, but I always look for him here first, because Miss Ida quickly gets sick of his foolishness and sends him packing.
When I come in for lunch Betty is ironing Artie’s school shirts, and Artie and Todd are in the kitchen on a sandwich assembly line. A Kool filter dangles from the corner of Betty’s mouth. Very thin, Betty wears her hair in a short-cropped Afro, and favors tight-fitting clothes, black or else violet, both of which show up good next to her medium brown skin. You can tell she and Artie are each other’s people, though her skin is just that much darker than his. Artie says she is around thirty, though she doesn’t seem much older than us. Who knows?
“Marshall,” she says as I come in. The cigarette drops an ash on the ironing board and she curses. “So we saved you from the big black bear.”