Aquaboogie

by Susan Straight

  She moved inside the doorway, but she could still smell the food from lunch, the air hanging at the jamb, belonging to the job. The bushes were quiet. Nobody had eaten much today, and usually they liked mashed potatoes and gravy. Winter wasn’t coming right, though, the wind hot as June, and holidays always put the old people through changes. I needs me a day off, she thought, and I’ma have to make turkey in three weeks—so they can all complain about how it’s not as good as theirs always was.

  Nucoa pushed into the swinging door like she could smell smoke all the way down the hall, talking about, “Give me a cigarette, Karen. I don’t got none today.”

  As if she ever do. “Nucoa, you don’t need this paycheck, huh? You think these old people won’t tell?”

  She knew what Karen was talking about. “Shit, you in the kitchen all day, you ain’t gotta hear it.”

  “I hear it sometimes. So? They just old, they ain’t got nobody to take it out on.” She stepped inside to give Nucoa a cigarette, putting out her own. Leaning against the racks holding the trays, Nucoa tried to get gravy off her uniform.

  “Nasty Mrs. Cottrell want to splat gravy at me. You ain’t had to deal with it, girl. I’m tired a this shit.”

  Karen turned back to the doorway and looked across the asphalt, the gray rising to meet blurry night. “What you staring at?” Nucoa asked. “Waiting for a shooting star?” She laughed. “A UFO?”

  “I hate winter. Dark in a second.”

  “Nighttime is the right time.”

  “Yeah, for you.” She listened. “It’s something rustling around in the bushes.”

  “I seen some wild dogs down in the river-bottom one time, when me and Marcella came down here after school. With Wendell and them driving around in the sand, acting a fool. German shepherds, mutts.”

  “Best not be no wild dogs, cause they’ll get in the trash.” Karen started filling up the bucket. When she bent to pour ammonia into the water, she saw Nucoa’s long dark fingers scratch the white stocking at her ankle, and she remembered the pinch-marks. “You trying to lose the job, though, I’m serious,” she said, and Nucoa sucked her teeth.

  “Yeah, you could hang, Karen, but my mama always did say I had a temper.” She sounded proud, and Karen felt anger pulling into her nose with the ammonia. Yeah, Karen don’t get mad. She too scary. Scared a you. She stepped away from the rising sharp steam and said, “You ain’t no better than Eddie Junior trying to get his little bit a power on Echo, push her when I’m not looking.” Then the lighter flashed. “Nucoa, don’t…” Mrs. Carpio came in. Damn, Karen thought. It better not be on me.

  “Vicky, you will be violate your probation. Smoking not permit in the kitchen, you do know this.” Her voice was click-click as forks in the sink. All the Filipino ladies sounded like that, and even the two orderlies. Nucoa dropped the cigarette, white slipping on white, into her pocket.

  Mrs. Carpio looked into the sink. Every day for two years she had checked to see if it was clean enough. I might get tired one night, Karen thought. Shit. But Mrs. Carpio was just like Mama—everything’s a job, if it’s a person, a vacuum, a sink. All the same, and you have to keep a eye on it. “Why do you call her Nu-coa?” Mrs. Carpio said suddenly, tipping her head forward. “Her name is Vicky, huh?”

  Mop-water swung in the bucket, and Karen wanted to bust out laughing. Nucoa didn’t even smile; she looked confused, like she had forgotten why herself. Oh, I can see me telling her all about that, how in school the guys used to watch girls walk by and talk about if they had enough butter, how far it stuck out, how tight the jeans were. Nucoa used to give it up to anybody on the basketball team, and when she got near the gym they would holler, “That’s the cheap stuff. Low-fat. Yeah, it ain’t butter, it’s Nucoa.”

  The kitchen lights flashed in Mrs. Carpio’s glasses when she looked up, but Nucoa didn’t even wait for Karen to say something. She just walked down the hall to the day room.

  When the water was gray as the asphalt, Karen tipped the bucket over and let the stream flow down toward the bushes. Grass and sunflowers grew there, at the edge of the dry where her water soaked in every night. I better say something nice to Nucoa. Some-timey as she is, she won’t give me a ride home. Damn Eddie, he need to get off his ass and fix my car. Can’t even sit out there to hear the radio while I smoke. She turned back to the door and stopped—was that white rising from the oleanders? Wisps of fog? She listened again, no sound, but shaky smoke reached through the long leaves; she saw the wind snatch and raise it to the streetlight. She walked to the only other brightness, to the warm-soup air, and hurried to close the door.

  “Why we gotta come to this muffler shop? I hate coming downtown,” she said to Eddie.

  “Cause it’s cheaper than the one on the Westside. And don’t start about you don’t even want to drive near the Manor. I know. You ain’t gotta go in today, you don’t want to see it. I don’t need to hear it.”

  “You need to hear me tell you I’m tired of riding with Nucoa.”

  “Yeah, yeah. She used to wait in the bathroom at school. You seen her pull Charlene’s earrings out. She don’t even remember that shit.” He wrapped his arms around the steering wheel like he was holding a woman, dancing, and stretched his back. Echo sat between them, leaning against Karen. She was not quite two. Eddie Junior sat in the back by himself, which he loved. He swung from window to window, singing, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”

  “We heard that enough when the show was on last night, huh, bro?” Eddie called, pulling into the parking lot. He didn’t look at Karen before he walked into the muffler shop. Eddie Junior ran behind him, and Karen watched the sidewalk, hand on Echo’s sleeping arched neck, waiting for them. Wackheads and crackheads and hypes, oh my. She refused to drive this way anymore.

  Because Freddy and Chris, and Ray-Ray, those were the faces that looked into the car window at a stoplight, eyes blank and hard as cement, not knowing who she was. “You got a dollar to spare?” She had danced with Freddy in the gym, walked past Ray-Ray when he said, “I want that cutie, the one with the African bootie. You, baby.” Ray-Ray started smoking that wack, angel-dusted joints, when they were seniors. She heard Freddy went on the pipe, and Chris, too. Sprung dudes, that’s what Eddie and his brothers called the guys who smoked rock. And they were, all wound up so tight their eyes bugged, their adam’s apples stuck out—no meat under their skin, no legs in their pants. “Anton, he’s sprung, too, man,” Eddie had said to someone on the phone last week.

  Echo sealed her cheek to Karen’s thigh with her warm baby-sleep sweat, and when she looked up, Eddie came toward the car, crossing a shadow on the cement. He lifted the point of his chin an inch, cool recognition, but Victor Miles looked straight past him.

  She could walk it, had walked it back when she was small and her cousins took them all the way down the arroyo, from the Westside. They lived in Green Hollows then, where her mother had a tiny house. Karen used to lie under the cool, dusty bushes every day, trying to hide from the peeling and washing, from shelling peas. From her mother’s voice. Then her mother had bought a house on the edge of the Westside, on Leonardo Street, a house larger but still so stuffed with brocaded furniture and chandeliers that her ladies were tired of, with glass figurines missing an arm or the lace of a skirt, rooms so silent and forbidden to breathe in that Karen found bushes there, too, in the backyard, and she pretended they still lived in the shotgun shack. The arroyo ran from Green Hollows, which had been razed now, down under the freeway and then alongside a white neighborhood, near downtown; then it went through a flood-control channel of cement, by an elementary school, and ended at the church and the river-bottom. She could walk it, she didn’t want to ride with Eddie and fight about the house and everything else. She stood in the kitchen, back to the clock.

  “Come on over,” he said into the phone. “My old lady can burn. She make some serious beans and rice.” Then he called, “What we got to eat?”

  “You ain’t got shit. I took the
kids to Mickey D’s last night,” she said. “I’m tired of cooking every morning before I go, cooking all day, and when I get home, too.”

  “I say I’ll cook, and you don’t eat it.”

  “Yeah, if I want toast and gravy. That’s all you ever make, like it’s some big treat.”

  He slammed his work boots onto the floor. “Well, shit, that’s all we had for breakfast at my house. I didn’t have no little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and shit.”

  “Why you want to bring up Mama?”

  “Cause she made you think you better than you are.”

  Karen threw the coffee cup at the wall, and the heavy plastic dented the paint. “That ain’t what we talking about! I want something to eat, I gotta make it! That’s the point! I want clean clothes for the kids, I gotta wash.”

  “Hell, I wash …”

  “Yeah, if I want it wrinkled, stains set in for life…”

  But he was quiet in the car. When they went into the shadow of the freeway underpass, he said, “Blood thought he was so hard. He coulda graduated—shit, he was in my math class when we were sophomores, talked big yang to Mr. Nichols. He knew everything, even them word problems used to kick my ass.”

  Oh, they’d been together so long, Karen thought, even before she let herself think of who he was talking about. Victor Miles. She’d been with Eddie half her life, it felt like, and they talked in shorthand. She knew.

  “I can’t say nothing,” he went on. “He thought he was hard, gangster down. It’s on him.”

  Victor was old-time wino, she thought, like the men that hung out in Lincoln Park. Wackheads looked normal in the body—their faces told you what they smoked. And sprung guys were bony as death, ash like pencil lead under their eyes. But Victor wasn’t either of those. He had muscles in his pants, thighs filling the brown-shined knit, and red eyes. Olde English 800, King Cobra, Night Train.

  “Fire’s out. Darnell Tucker said it was people living in the river-bottom started it,” Eddie said. “Third one in a month.”

  She didn’t want to think about Victor, and it was easy to go back to what she’d expected. “You had time to be over there talking to Darnell and the Tuckers? Where was the kids?”

  “You know where they were. Tuckers only two doors from Mama’s.”

  “Must be nice to hang out.”

  “Yeah, I’m just a partying fool. Talk to some neighbors for half an hour.”

  She looked out the window. “I ain’t even got time to wash my hair and you can be at your mama’s watching football.” He swerved around the corner by the Safeway, and she was relieved. She closed the car door without saying goodbye.

  Nucoa had “NUCOA” in red sparkling rhinestones down her left thigh, back then. Arlene Thibodeaux had “PAYBACK.” Marcella had “PEACHES.” And Karen had wanted Sweet Thang, the song she loved—she traced it on paper during class, how she’d write it with a marker, push the pale-blue rhinestone studs through the thick denim. But mama had a comb she loved to whap against the back of Karen and Esther’s necks, teeth reaching into skin so fast they couldn’t move.

  Victor didn’t write anything. He had Marcella do his fly, outline it in the pure white flashes. The teachers made him go to the principal, the principal said take off the studs or go home, and he never came back except for lunchtimes, when he’d lean close to small white boys and say, “Lemme borrow a dime, homey. You can spare it.” The security officer escorted him out, to make sure he passed the fence around the school.

  “You want some a this chicken?” she asked Nucoa after lunch.

  “Girl, we done had fried chicken four times this week at my house. We got wings up under these clothes.”

  Karen breathed in and started. Why was she still afraid of Nucoa? “I heard Mrs. Carpio talking to Cottrell. She’ll bust you Nucoa. You got her bad this time. I ain’t playing, you need to stop.”

  “Shut up, Karen. You so scary, worry about being Miss Perfect all the time. You and your mama.” She stroked her eyebrows. “If Mrs. Carpio talk to you, you got my back, right?”

  High school—you got my back? I got it, people said… I’ll watch out behind you. Karen stirred the cooking carrots. “You gon lose your job.”

  “Ain’t no money! Lester front me some rock sugar cane to sell, I’m gone.”

  Karen stared at her. “You hanging around him? I heard he was in jail.”

  “Not no more. He setting people up. But you wouldn’t know.”

  When Nucoa left the kitchen, Karen went to the day room to collect the cups visitors always left. It was Sunday. A boy screeched up the drive in a Toyota truck, combing his hair hurriedly as he walked to the front door. Plump women carrying bags—Karen knew they were trimmings for Thanksgiving.

  She hated working Sundays. Eddie didn’t care. He took the kids to his mother’s, and he and his brothers watched football, basketball, goddamn golf, probably, if they had to.

  Fingers sticking to the squares of frozen food she unwrapped, she thought about the bathroom suddenly, the bathroom at home. They were out of toilet paper, that’s what she’d forgotten to tell Eddie. And he’d never notice. Damn, she’d have to walk to Safeway in a few minutes, when she took her break.

  The door swung open, and Nucoa breathed into her ear. “Thanks for nothing, cause I don’t need you.” She slammed her sole against the outer door and walked to her car, Karen watching her from the cement that showed splashes of soap scum.

  Crows were thick as pepper in the sky when she made them rise from the fields she walked past, and they circled until she was far enough gone. They dropped walnuts onto the street, pecked hard at the shells until cars came, carried them off in their beaks. Why didn’t they attack her? Karen wondered. She was alone, and they covered the eucalyptus and pepper trees while she passed underneath. They shifted nervously above her.

  At the checkout, she stood with the toilet paper, juice, and crackers, thinking that Eddie would have to take the kids to his mother’s and come to pick her up every night now. She hooked her wrist through the plastic Safeway bag and saw Victor Miles arguing with a boxboy. She couldn’t hear what he said, just saw his arm cradling a six-pack of Miller, his eyes rosy with anger. She walked past slowly, looking at the plants by the door, the chrysanthemums like her mother used to buy for Thanksgiving dinner, for the table. He walked through the parking lot, past all the cars, and she looked at her watch. Fifteen more minutes on her break. Touching the flowers, she waited, and realized she was afraid of him.

  Beer bottles had always been strewn in the fields, near the oleanders. The kids liked to get drunk in the church parking lot. She couldn’t see labels on any of the bottles near her feet now, and she thought, it doesn’t have to be him leaving them. But listening for a moment at the oleanders, the leaves sharp as knife blades, she imagined his teeth reflecting the light from the street, and the earring he’d always worn sparkling next to them like a star close to the sliver of moon.

  She lay between them on her side. Echo clutching a fistball of Karen’s T-shirt, Eddie’s hand dead weight on her hip. Breathing hissed up over her shoulders, hovered over her face. Victor Miles with only a sheet of smoke at his hair, the dead flowers and leaves filling in the spaces behind his knees—he lay on his. back, she thought, and the wind flew up over the bushes and away from him. She put out fish sticks and peas, mashed potatoes and gravy. The sky-blue tray looked small by the door. She knew he saw her. Should she call out his name? Stepping back inside, she took a napkin and wrote Sweet Thang, then crumpled it up. The door she left open like she’d just washed the floor, and she stood by the refrigerator, feeling the hum bounce against her skin.

  Did the weeds crackle? Hard shoes crushed the gritty asphalt. “Somebody feeding a damn cat?” he said to the doorway. She moved toward him; he’d seen her.

  His toe, the pointy tip of the shoe, pushed the tray until the peas rolled off the plate. “You gon have wild animals if you leave garbage outside. I don’t know who else this shit is for.” He to
ok a paper bag out of his coat pocket. His green Army jacket, the brown pants flaring at the ankle. Golden Arches on the bag—he threw it on the tray. “More trash for you. Ain’t that your job?” He looked at her uniform, not her face. She covered up her nametag—Karen: Staff. Sweet Thang. But he walked, fist down like high school.

  Hot between her shoulders, she put down her pack of cigarettes where the tray had been, and closed the door.

  When the canned peaches had slithered into their dessert cups and swam nestled together, she opened the door, and the cigarettes were gone. She knew he had taken them, because nobody had walked in off the street; between peaches, she’d gone to the day-room window again and again.

  When she waited for Eddie, though, in the parking lot where visitors came, she saw the fat pack of Tareytons caught in the cactus by the front door, where the wind must have pushed it along the cleaned cement. She put it in her bag and ran her shoe over the peas and pepper berries and gravel blowing across the empty parking spaces.

  toe up and smoke dreaming

  DARNELL / NOVEMBER

  SPINDLY LITTLE GRASS AND wild oats, that’s all there was to catch and crackle. No. This ain’t acceptable. This doesn’t qualify, Darnell thought. The fire flew with the breeze and barely touched down, hanging like orange cobwebs on the stems, never burning hard but skittering across the field. Darnell clambered up the hill behind Fricke, watching the flames jump across the highway. This roadside went up every year, Fricke had said, and Darnell remembered it from last year, when he’d been here with the Conservation Corps and most of the big stuff had burned off. The cars idling up the highway thrummed in the air, exhaust shaking above them. The blaze disappeared instantly under the water, but little patches of the silence that flame made, the quiet of sucked-up oxygen and reaching heat, landed like rags for a few more minutes. Then they were gone. Disappointment washed hot below his throat. No, this doesn’t qualify, hell no. We’re just half-stepping, and this is the last one. Not acceptable. Lester always says that, but he’s talking about women. Not fires. He’d laugh silly if he heard me.