Aquaboogie

by Susan Straight

  When Brichée’s in her office, down the hall from our bedroom, I hear her 10-key sounding like the mice that tapped inside the walls when I was small. Everything’s thin in this new house. One night she was bitching about the parquet floor—she said another splinter got her, and she was tired of trying to keep the wood shined. “We should have picked tile,” she said. “I’m going to get a maid. I see their cars down the street when I’m home late in the morning.”

  I told her no way, no maid. That was too close. “Don’t get black on me,” she said. “I’ll do it if I want.”

  “What am I, the field nigger?” I yelled, and then I did something I remember my father doing when he wanted to prove his house was his. I punched the closest door. But when my father did it, the frame shook, and everyone was quiet. My whole damn door caved in, hollow as a wafer cookie. I bought a carved oak door after that—it matched the floor anyway, and it’ll recoup the money I spent.

  I sit down with my back to the chimney and watch the crows parade and fight in the field across from the grove. My father saw a house as old as this one had been, a small Victorian with all the gingerbread trim, when I was still at city college. He took me downtown to see it. “Take you a belt sander to some of that wood inside, stain it up,” he said, standing on the porch, looking in the windows with me. The front room had a built-in china hutch. A mess, but it had potential. “Paint the trim with all them different colors. This the kind of veranda I always thought your mama would like,” he said, and it was true; she spent hours outside on the little square cement steps at our house, shelling peas or pulling the husks off corn. “Can’t fit but one more woman out there with her,” my father would say while we were working on a lawn-mower, “and you know she need at least two to talk about me like a dog.”

  At the old house downtown, he stood next to me, close, and said, “You buy this, you won’t be stuck on the Westside, but you won’t be far away.” I remember looking at the street, ragged at the edges, thinking it could go either way, restored or run-down. “What?” he said. “It’s cheap. You want to own, right?”

  I’d already thought of Woodbridge then, of location, but I was still saving up the down payment and starting the business. My father died a year after that, left me the down payment—two insurance policies that he’d been paying on for years, since he and my mother had first moved here from Jackson, Mississippi years before I was born. They’d lived in their house for thirty-one years, bought it for $9,000, paid it off. A $9,000 house in southern California. Everybody, my aunt, cousins, they’ve all been in the same houses for as long as I can remember. I knew exactly when their plum trees were ready to pick, when they’d call me to come stake the baby fig because the Santa Anas were blowing.

  I bought in Woodbridge. I asked Mama to come live with me; I’m the only child. “You can’t walk to nothin up there—it ain’t no store, no church, nowhere. Uh-uh, baby, don’t worry. Sister and them can come here.” My aunt Sister and cousin Tarina came to stay with her, and they can all fit in the kitchen to talk at the same time, if not on the steps.

  Mama comes to the newest house and laughs at the self-cleaning oven, the garbage disposal, the trash compactor. Brichée loves this house, with the most appliances we’ve had.

  “What is this, self-cleaning?” Mama reads.

  “Brichée spilled some barbecue sauce in there one night, and the next day she turned it onto self-clean, came back from work and it was just a little gray ashy spot,” I said, pointing to the dial.

  “She still have to wipe out the ashy stuff?” Tarina asked.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Why she don’t just wipe the damn stuff up in the first place then?”

  “Hush,” Mama said. “Brichée got all these rinds and peelings in the sink, though. Why you don’t put them on your compost heap, Trent? Ain’t no need to be grinding them up.”

  “Mama, nobody keeps compost anymore. It just breeds bugs and disease.”

  “Shoot, you gon have bugs anyway. Everybody got bugs. Less you got a self-cleaning yard, too,” she said, and Tarina cracked up, loving it. On Labor Day, Memorial Day, any of them, Brichée won’t come down to Mama’s yard for ribs and potato salad and peach cobbler. She says she has bills or accounts to do, but I know it’s because Tarina and my cousins always start on her. Tarina looks out the etched-glass pane in the front door, checking out the street. “All y’all got the same kind of houses in this track?”

  I know better than to correct her word. “Three models, but each one’s slightly different, and that’s why the landscaping’s so important.”

  “Huh,” she says, looking back at the living room. At Christmas, Tarina told everyone, “Brichée got it so clean and pale in there you don’t wanta walk. And don’t bring no babies, now.” The house was light—Brichée did this one in cream carpet, cream walls, light-oak picture frames to match the mantel and banister. Pale mauve furniture. Even the living room fireplace was light marble—alabaster, I think she called it. She does the insides, looks at those funny curtains, balloons and valances she says, and I do the outsides. f used to study the old-money houses my father cut, where the ladies gave teas in their rose arbors. Those gardens have subtle colors, silvery gray and blue salvia, huge cabbage-headed dahlias, bronze chrysanthemums. I read the Architectural Digests, the Horticultures, the high-class stuff. I looked at the hedges, the shapes, the blending colors, before I did mine.

  No huge plum trees in the front, no figs or apricots, no beans and tomatoes growing up the side of a chainlink fence. No food in the front yard, because that meant you were raising something you needed. And nothing like morning glories, geraniums, common flowers.

  I remembered the gardens at the very top of the hill, the estates that had been there for decades. I did mine English country, with old-fashioned borders and white wooden arches, the trellis for roses, and this time, a gazebo with purple clematis at the sides. Perennials, flowers no one else around here uses, columbine and delphinium and veronica. We always sell in the spring, when everything is blooming. Next year will be the same.

  They go fast because it looks like Prince Charles or some earl lives there, as close as I can get it. We’ll arrange with the realtor to show people during the day, as usual, when we’re gone. If the lookers saw me, they’d bug.

  I ride past the last grove, around the corner toward Gardenia again. The cars are still racing, I can hear ahead of me, and the sky lightens up near the edges of the hills, getting deeper above. This whole area will sell, I think, sell fast. I know Rio Seco, all of it, so I watch for my next move. You have to learn the boundaries, the newly-razed trees or cleared fields, the right hills. I tried to tell my cousin Snooter last year when he visited. He rode Brichée’s bike, the one she never touches anyway, and I showed him the layout of our tract, told him about location and resale. He started laughing when I shifted gears. “Hey, I used to ride this bike for keeps, you forgot?” I told him. “I had to learn to do it right.”

  “Yeah, Trent, we used to see you motorvating home from school on that ten-speed, talking about that was your cruise, man.” He pulled next to me. “Let me ax you something, cause you don’t never stop. When we were kids, you use to just let go, you know, ride with no hands. When you do that, man, you know what you steering with? Your crotch. Remember?”

  He was in my face then, and I couldn’t laugh, but my crotch is sore now, on the way up the slope, and I have to smile. My legs, too. My father used to holler at me when I said I was tired of pushing the mower. “Go on, you better pass me and improve that shit. Cause if you lag behind, I’ma turn around and run yo ass over.”

  “You wouldn’t tow me, Pops?”

  “Shit, I didn’t raise you to pull you.”

  I pump hard up Gardenia, scaring the last of the crows out of the empty field before Grayglen. They join the flock flying down toward the river, over the city. I used to see them every night about this time, when I was standing in my father’s yard, and I’d watch them div
e at each other when they got mad. Inside Grayglen, an illegal is still swiping circle patterns into the cement of an entry, and past him, I look up my street. All the garage doors are closed. Now I can hear the sprinklers coming on, the clicks of automatic timers starting them up; I pass the vibrating air conditioners, the buzzing pool filters that seem to float heavy in the air. I never put in pools—they’re a liability sometimes, not a sure asset. I think of a spa, but then I remember our house has a spa, in the master tub. We’ve never used it. The dark is coming down fast now, making all the hisses and humming seem louder, and by the time I get close to the end of our street, I see TVs flashing blue through the windows. In each of the yards and driveways I pass, no one is outside.

  chitlins

  LANIER / AUGUST

  LANIER GOT OFF WORK right at six, not waiting around to talk with Robert and the younger guys coming on shift. He pulled the small Ford truck out of the lot quickly; the cab was already hot, the windshield full of dry light and bright floating dust. The dawn didn’t take but a minute to make a day in August, he thought, no messing around with haze and low clouds to burn off in a few hours. Serious hundred-degree days, and he wanted to get out to the place and fill the wallows with water.

  Nearly all the other cars were going the opposite direction on the freeway, fenders flashing in the low sun. They were heading into L.A., had an hour to go, and he was already cruising down the slope into Rio Seco, taking the offramp just past the old railroad bridge to the Westside. He drove parallel to the tracks for a few minutes, putting his head out the window when he came to the citrus packing house, looking for the too-small, unsaleable oranges and grapefruit that Perez sometimes left in a pile for him. The dirt was bare, hard-packed by the feet that stood and rubbed there during lunch. All the Mexican workers peeling and licking at oranges; he saw them if he woke up early and went to talk to Perez.

  The ’49 Chevy dump truck was in the alley behind his house. He checked to see if Red Man’s Apache was there, too, the one he parked behind Lanier’s because his own yard was full of cars, motorcycles, and junk. The two-ton was half-full, flatbed covered with splintered wood, chunks of plaster and wallboard, concrete. Red Man must have cleaned out another old building for one of the contractors. The dogs heard Lanier now and threw themselves against the bent fences all up and down the alley, did it every morning at 6:20 knowing it was him. From the sandy path, he could see into the backyards, long and narrow, through the chainlink or barbwire braced with cardboard and scrap wood. The old sisters across the way, on Picasso Street, had put in corn again this year, when they’d sworn it was too much trouble and they were going to buy it at the store. Their tomatoes flopped, too hot already, against the wire cages.

  Unlocking the shed that opened onto the alley, he heard Lee Myrtle’s ducks murmur and shift on the other side of the wood. Every morning, he had to load the shovels onto the Chevy and then put them back into the shed at night, or the gangs that ran the alley would take them, take anything: chicken wire, trash cans, hoses, hoes. On the wooden slats that closed in the flatbed, he’d had to paint a black rectangle to cover LOS DEMENTES DE WESTSIDE SECO.

  Through his fence, he could see the back porch, where the light was on. When he was younger, Lee Myrtle would sleep during the day, while he did, but now she woke up as he came home. He turned before he saw her, because he wanted to hurry.

  “Lanier,” she called just when he’d gotten up into the seat. “Ain’t you gon eat?”

  “I got a load to get,” he shouted, firing up the engine, listening close when it popped and stopped. The truck was huge and scarred as a rhinoceros he’d seen on TV, and in the rearview mirror he saw the shreds of lettuce and carrot tops hanging from the gates, dangling and jumping with the bumps in the dirt.

  The fish market was only a few blocks away, next to Top Cat Liquor. When Lanier started to pull around the back, he could smell the clams and oysters from the street. They were piled by the wall, some scattered on the asphalt close to the open door, and after he’d scraped the spilled ones into the boxes, he leaned into the doorway to holler. “Hey, Jim, ain’t you got no shrimp? You know they love some shrimp, them big ones you be lettin go when they get green. Don’t be stingy, now.”

  “Shut up, Lanier,” Jim said. “Too many of them Louisiana niggers makin gumbo or whatever they want to cook with that big shrimp. Goon.”

  The L&L Market had left a heap of smashed watermelons and a mound of empty smiles, cut rinds that rocked back and forth on the ground when they fell off the truck. Lanier was sweating, his work shirt wet all down the back, and he pulled himself away from the seat now and then to let the wind touch there. People always shook their heads at him, said, “Man, you just get off a nine-hour shift and want to shovel up all that stanky stuff? You ain’t got no sense. I’d be in the feed, no questions axed.”

  “This my cocktail time, fool,” he would say. “You don’t come home from work and get in the bed, you gon sit there with your beer. Red Man gon sit there with his twelve-pack.” They all laughed. Red Man said, “Well, shit, what you drinkin for relaxation, then? Hog slop? You’s a crazy nigger.”

  The truck blew dust along the frontage road, and now he was driving along with the traffic still going to L.A., but he was higher up on the bank. When he shifted gears to turn down the curving dirt road, the cab shook and roared; he saw four of the pigs out again, waiting for him, pushing through yesterday’s boxes and a pile of cardboard. The sow with the broken hind leg stood alone, a shadow near the pepper tree.

  He didn’t want to kill her yet. She wasn’t nearly the fattest, and no one would want meat for months. He’d just done a sow, one that hadn’t had a litter for two years, for somebody’s Fourth of July.

  This one kept her distance, not letting him near to examine the leg; she was wild as ever, running jerky when he tried to get near. Big, about two-hundred-fifty pounds, her hair thin as brown summer grass, and she seemed happy to be separate from the others, fed by herself. He dropped a heap of rinds near the straw mound where she usually hid from the sun.

  The others kicked up puffs and trails of dust, running for the food he threw over the fences: first the babies and females, in the pen to the east with the tin-roofed shelters, then the males and yearlings in the large, free-range section. They ran in close to the wood that squared around the rocky ground and baby tumbleweeds, still blue green now and the only plants left anywhere in the heat.

  The males screamed and fought over the clams, and the new piglets, dog-sized, snuffled into the watermelon meat, almost buried in the fruit, then shoved out slimy-pink by their impatient mothers. Lanier sat under the ancient pepper tree, branches hanging limp and dusty as a sick rooster’s tail feathers. Across from him, the killing shack was empty and silent. He fed the pigs corn and water there for a few weeks before they were shot and pulled to the cement slab. The smaller pepper tree’s limbs stretched over the slab, dangling the chains that lifted the meat.

  He would wait until the pigs were finished with the first frantic crunchings, listening to them click the clamshells together, before he checked the fence. New holes had been pushed out somewhere, because the twin piglets ran across the dirt road to the hillside. Lanier threw a rock behind them. Black faces, black butts, with a white stripe wide as a sash circling their middles. He hadn’t seen two so perfectly matched, running so closely together, for a long time. They darted into the fence and Lanier stood up to follow them, find the opening, but the heat waved in the dust, and he sat back against the tree. Another wooden pallet would have to be stood on its side and pounded into the dirt between the rotted gray posts that were on the land when he bought it. The plywood and scrap he jammed into the gaps always came loose, but he fixed only the largest holes. The pigs never went anywhere, never strayed far from the food. They nosed outside, rooted in the scatterings of junk Red Man dumped, the bedsteads and fenders and cookstoves he had found and insisted he’d need later, and if they found no leftover tatters of cabbage or a cla
mshell that still smelled, they walked back inside and lay under the shelters or slid into the deep furrows they’d worn in the earth, the pits he filled with water. When he closed his eyes, he heard Mississippi, heard himself fifteen and trying to hide from the plow and his father’s field; he was fifty-four now, but when he leaned his head against the pepper tree, the hair at the back of his neck was still thick enough to cushion against the rough bark, and the police helicopter, probably swooping over the Westside as usual, was just a hummingbird. The sounds of sirens and the rushing cars from the freeway weren’t loud enough to cut through the pigs’ hollering and threatening each other over the oysters.

  When he woke up, at about two, he went out to the front porch for a few minutes to clear his head. The fan turned back and forth behind him in the kitchen, where Lee Myrtle sat writing a letter to her sister. Lanier heard the deep hum from down the street, mixing with the fan, and then the vibrations separated into drumbeats, quick, echoing, metal-sharp; they pounded in his head for a moment, a blacksmith hammering mule shoes back in Grenada. He shook his hand, which he’d slept on, felt the tingles in his palm and then his ears. “Damn sideshow. Why I always gotta listen to what they do?” he said. The customized Toyota pickup, speakers in the covered bed, pulled into the yard next door and parked diagonally across the dirt.

  “One or another of em was in and out all night,” Lee Myrtle said, not raising her head. “They been up there hollerin for the girl, bout she owe them.”

  The driver sat, unmoving, and his doors vibrated with music. Lanier touched the side of the house, went into the backyard to check the melons and tomatoes. Two ducks ran from the pounding drums, past Lanier when he stood next to the peach and plum trees. The girl next door was out now, in her robe, talking to the boy in the passenger seat. She must don’t sleep till I do, Lanier thought, cause she wake up about the same time. Lee Myrtle had said the stereo was loud until long after she gave up and went into the extra room to sleep, and the girl’s three children ran the streets after dark. Rencie, that was her name. The house had belonged to her Auntie Viola, a widow who’d never remarried. Viola was from Jackson, moved in only a few years after Lanier and Lee Myrtle. Picasso Street was all Mississippi then—Biloxi, Mayersville, Grenada—only Red Man and Lonzo from Oklahoma.